On Indigenous Art, Politics and Aesthetics. Sa and Milanez,

In the piece by Sa and Milanez, they provide an entry into discussing the role of indigenous art production in countering racism in the country. They start by discussing first the denial of racism in Brazil, veiled under the ideas of racial democracy. They show the persistence of racism as forms of discrimination in the every day, in the legal system, and in structural dynamics. They highlight too, the way in which racism against indigenous people in Brazil is rarely discussed and spoken under the grammar and discourse of racism, and yet the way violence against indigenous individuals, as well as land grabbing deserves an examination under racism, as a system organizing the social structures after colonization that maintain the structures of land distribution, as well as ideas of identity located in the body, and behaviors as emerging from shared set of bio-cultural identifiers (Wade and Moreno 2020).
 Thus they identify politics and actions of indigenous and indigenous as being shaped in racist relations. Examples are the killing of indigenous people, the laxity of criminal justice towards perpetrators. The article is based on the analysis of art pieces and on interviews or written interventions of the artists. The authors explicitly define the artists voices as sources and not as informants as a political and methodological intervention

In this context, the pieces they discuss clearly position as a critique of specific actions of racism as well as larger structures. One example is (insert name of the artist) the portrait of a killed indigenous leader which puts into conversation the violence as well as the invisibility of the violence. Likewise, the interventions of an artist in an art history book brings the intelligible history of European internal colonization to understanding the actions in brazil as a comparable relationship. I would further argue that this becomes simultaneously an act of translation as translocation and an action of making a conflict visible, rendering it legible, for the European education "universal history" grand narratives. I found particularly interesting the piece "Faith in-dio", and the discussion on the polysemy of the piece refers to the action of religious colonization. Likewise, the pieces that interact with museum "collection" is a simultaneous critique of ethnography and science as another form of appropriation and subordination of indigenous knowledge, actions, and life. 

The questions that emerge for me is around what happens if we re-aggregate these pieces/events together. 

- In which ways, if they do, are artists mapping, linking different forms of racism and the effects of racist practices as producing the larger social dynamics? 
- How are the art pieces as interventions in this cartography reshaping these links and coming together with one and other? 
- Are there limits to this suggestion of "reaggregation," are there pieces by indigenous artists or by non-indigenous who engage in indigenous politics/ aesthetics around indigeneity and fail to confront racism, or may reinscribe stereotypes (as the mentioned "Dia do Indio")?.