The Jaguar and the Snake

Endangered Human Movements Vol. 3

Performance

“The Jaguar and the Snake“ is a study of Amerindian iconography in which the animal vegetal and human co exist in one figure. Multiple, manyfold beings become alive in an unendless transformation.  Inspired by the manyfold beings populating the oral and visual traditions of Amerindian cultures. Based on a deep iconographic research Amanda Piña,  work on embodying beings where the animal, the human and the vegetal meet fuse and transform.

What other forms of relationships are possible between animals, humans and plants?

The performance explores how these concepts are understood in Amerindian terms creating a visionary world between ancestral indigenous knowledge and contemporary performance art.

“The ethnologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, who has worked on the indigenous people of the Amazonas, can help us enter these reflections. For the latter, the original condition common to humans and animals is not animality, but humanity. The animals are ex-humans, the humans aren’t ex-animals. Where the West imagines itself a multiculturalism, a diversity of representations that has an influence on an external nature, one and total, Amerindians conceive the opposite: a representative unity, a purely pronominal phenomenology, apply indifferently on a real diversity. One single „culture“, multiple „natures“; constant epistemology, a changeable ontology. The point of view is found in the body. “

– Delphine Albrecht, trainee of communication and mediation at TU

„(…) In sum, animals are people, or see themselves as persons. Such a notion is virtually always associated with the idea that the manifest form of each species is a mere envelope (a ‘clothing’) which conceals an internal human form, usually only visible to the eyes of the particular species or to certain trans-specific beings such as shamans.”

– Cosmological Deixis and Amerindian Perspectivism, Eduardo Viveiros De Castro

Interview on the piece:

https://e-tcetera.be/dancing-with-a-deer-a-jaguar-or-a-snake/