Unsettling Utopia: Southern Brazil

Maria Thereza Alves reads her new poem, a tribute to a courageous woman who claimed her identity as Indigenous in her father’s village in Brazil, while most people were too ashamed or afraid to do so. (Photo: Maria Thereza Alves)

In this cowritten travelogue between Europe and the Americas, Wilma Lukatsch and Noara Quintana open up a dialogic landscape to reflect on the manifold ways in which colonial thinking shapes common ground and the imagination. They meet each other in the midst of this mess of colonial destruction to tell another story of being Indigenous from Southern Brazil. And along the way they envision a decolonized way of being together. (Photo: Noara Quintana)

This essay entangles the story of Maria with the histories of German settlement in Southern Brazil and its disastrous consequence for Indigenous peoples. (Photo: Bugreiros e suas vítimas II. | Bugreiros and their victims II., unknown photographer)

The contributors would like to thank Alanis Obomsawin for her inspiring dedication to Indigenous voices, the Guarani Mymba Roká Indigenous community of Biguaçu, the curators of The Children Have to Hear Another Story – Alanis Obomsawin, Hila Peleg and Richard William Hill, as well as the team of HKW.