WALKERS

CAMINHANTES (WALKERS) is a work by Ariel Kuaray Ortega, Guarani Mbyá artist and filmmaker based in Koenju village; Gabriel Bogossian, writer and curator, and Victor Leguy, Brazilian artist and researcher, both based in São Paulo. The work is based on the diary of the last expedition of the Swiss ethnographer and photographer Thomas Bischi, fictional character created by Gabriel Bogossian, who disappeared in the Guarani territories between the north of Argentina and the south of Brazil in 1902. Bischi, a belle époque figure, was fascinated by the indigenous world, repeatedly photographed and drawn by him; his diary reflects this fascination and brings some of the images he produced. The character was developed after the combination of the lives and deeds of different historical figures that, in the first decades of anthropology and of photography, explored the hinterlands of the American continent. The contexts that he visits – Montevideo of the beginning of the 20th century and the Guarani world, squeezed between farms of mate and nation States geopolitics of the period – are all informed by historical reports and inhabited by historical figures. Formerly occupied by the Jesuit missions, the territories crossed by Bischi were later stage for different armed conflicts along the centuries. They bear also the marks of the Guarani presence and their complex and beautiful religiosity. (1) The single channel video is 61’ long and is composed of 28 short videos created by Ortega and Leguy, where each video corresponds to a day in the text of the diary. Each artist chose a free amount of days, producing their own particular perspectives on the Bischian journey. The videos were produced exploring a vast diversity of audiovisual resources and styles, from found footage to 3D animation, in a procedure that ambitions to reflect the function of our memory and its bricolage of elements. They explore different ways some political qualities of images and, in their chapter-like structure, aim to trigger our Netflix-shaped sensibility and its economy of expectation. The 28 videos were exhibited at aarea.co in June, 2022, as an online video installation in which they could be watched chronologically or randomly. The work was sponsored by ProAc 2021/ Secretaria de Economia Criativa of the state of São Paulo and it is a development of an investigation by Bogossian and Leguy on the forms of representation of the indigenous world in Latin America, previously shown at O museu inexistente n. 1.