Nature

The camera people

Performance

“There is a tribe known as the ethnographic Filmmakers , who believe they are invisible. (….) Outsiders know little of them, for their homes are hidden in the partially uncharted rain forest of the documentary. Like other documentarians they survive by hunting and gathering information.”

— Eliot Weinberger, The Camera People

Indigeneity nowadays transcends the romantic, undefined desire of Western Culture for all that it lacks, for a return to nature and simplicity. The concept of indigeneity is used to engage with urgent social, philosophical, cultural and environmental issues. It is used to negotiate trans-local power-structures and to create trans-indigenous discourse.

The idea is still going around that by observing indigenous communities and naming their behavioural particularities and cultural practices, it is possible to know them. It is like the idea of underdevelopment in the Third World an extremely ethnocentric idea. The so-called developed countries export and appraise the “civilizing benefits of modernity”, but when the Third World takes the path of industrialization they are suddenly no more than “barbaric instigators of environmental damage”. Much damage is done thanks to people and entire countries based on the concepts of scientific rationalism, people who know the facts and know how things are done. We decided not to know. It is from this standing point of ignorance that we imitate, ask, try to understand by smelling, tasting, doing, laughing and enjoying. And in the end, who knows if we are the wiser?