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 Manifesto Antropófago (Anthropophagite Manifesto). Andrade, a Euro-Brazilian from an influential family, first introduced the notion of Anthropophagy as cultural cannibalism in 1928, arguing that Brazil should "devour" European culture to transform it into something uniquely Brazilian. However, this foundational text simultaneously appropriated Europe's conflicting stereotypes of the indigenous "Other"—both "barbarous pagan" and "noble savage"—into a statement of national cultural emancipation. This metaphor proved resilient, re-emerging in the 1960s to articulate the violence and resistance of life under the military dictatorship, and again in the 1990s, when the internationalization of Brazilian art led to Anthropophagy becoming an oversimplified way to present Brazilian art to foreign markets.
The installation, functioning as an unraveling knot, addresses the idea of anthropophagy as a key concept that helped forge a sense of national identity. Ultimately, the work suggests that 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.
