Aluna, on being in charge
Closed in a little room in Lisbon, during the pandemic, I see all kinds of movies. One of them is Aluna, a 2012 documentary about Kogi tribe and the warning they decided to send to the "Younger Brother", the Spanish-speaking white man or simply the modern world. The message of the documentaries encounters all those calls for recognition of the "epistemologies of the South", since the Indians wanted to say something quite precise, concerning the water cycle, invasive species, the sanctuaries of biodiversity across the mountains and sea shore they were traditionally controlling and, in their own way, carefully studying. They got an Oxford expert's keen attention. At least it is supposed to seem so on the movie.
Connecting the hot spots with the golden thread they cared to bring themselves from what appears to be an English manufacturer, they create something that would be a remarkable work of art in modern Western artistic tradition; probably it speaks so persuasively because by some strange coincidence it enters our mental orbit, is so nicely post-modern. But what strikes me most in the documentary is the persuasion of being the managers of the world that the Indians had. They believed to be actually responsible for the state of the forest they inhabited. Apparently, it is not only a Judeo-Christian message, nothing connected with the modernity. It is probably something far more universal to believe that we, as a group, a tribe, a race, are in charge. Contemporary humanities, or post-humanities as some people say, try to criticise and eradicate this presumption. Anthropocene, for those barefooted Indians, had nonetheless arrived thousands of years ago; in fact, at the very beginning of everything.
Lisbon, 4.04.2020.
Connecting the hot spots with the golden thread they cared to bring themselves from what appears to be an English manufacturer, they create something that would be a remarkable work of art in modern Western artistic tradition; probably it speaks so persuasively because by some strange coincidence it enters our mental orbit, is so nicely post-modern. But what strikes me most in the documentary is the persuasion of being the managers of the world that the Indians had. They believed to be actually responsible for the state of the forest they inhabited. Apparently, it is not only a Judeo-Christian message, nothing connected with the modernity. It is probably something far more universal to believe that we, as a group, a tribe, a race, are in charge. Contemporary humanities, or post-humanities as some people say, try to criticise and eradicate this presumption. Anthropocene, for those barefooted Indians, had nonetheless arrived thousands of years ago; in fact, at the very beginning of everything.
Lisbon, 4.04.2020.
