For Each Farewell, a Knot (2025)

Ellen Nunes

Two-channel video installation

Dimensions variable

For Each Farewell, a Knot, draws on the artist's own mixed Portuguese and caboclo (Indigenous and European) heritage as she describes her experience with the Krahô tribe in Tocantins. Although initially perceived as "white" by the Krahô, she was invited to undergo a ceremonial baptism to become "one of them," in a ritual in which she was given the new name, Kapekwii.

The artist addresses this experience in a video installation that uses two projectors and mirrors to create duplicated perspectives of her Krahô baptism. One view shows her walking towards the camera, while the other shows her walking away. This repeated ritual of walking between two rows of chanting tribe members, who declare the death of "Ellen" and the rebirth of "Kapekwii," becomes a central motif. The duplicated images, reflected in mirrors, form a knot, symbolizing the weaving of her new identity with the old.

The work engages with and critiques the homogenizing notion of a national culture found in the ideas of Oswald de Andrade's Anthropophagite Manifesto. Andrade, a Euro-Brazilian from an influential family, used the metaphor of indigenous cannibalism to argue that Brazil should "devour" European culture, transforming it into something uniquely Brazilian. His manifesto appropriated Europe's conflicting stereotypes of the indigenous "Other”—both "barbarous pagan" and "noble savage"—into a statement of national cultural emancipation.

As an unravelling knot, the installation addresses the manifesto as a foundational text for Brazilian modernism, one that helped forge a sense of national identity. However, this concept conceals the uncomfortable reality of a deeply divided society, where its miscegenated people are rarely conscious of descending from both victims and oppressors. When turned inward, anthropophagy reveals itself to be an act of internal cultural appropriation.