Denilson Baniwa

Suely, an Indigenous woman living in a large Brazilian city, spends her days in a small apartment. In her dreams, she communicates with a forest and connects to secrets of a world undergoing radical changes.

Like Ty ty - memórias de beija flor, this short video by Denilson Baniwa projects the violence of colonisation onto an urban context, positing the transformed, devoted forest as a site of reinvention. Denilson Baniwa is an indigenous artist who was born in the village of Darí, in Rio Negro, Amazonas. He is an anthropophagous artist who he appropriates Western languages to decolonize them in his work.

In this film, I talk about the bookshop, and what is the bookshop? Nothing but a big forest turned into stories, the books are parts of trees. The leaves of the trees, the pages of the books. And the book is the bark of the tree transformed into stories that enchant us, that touch us, that we share, from which we learn. And for bookshops and fiction to exist, we need trees. The possibility of reforesting so that our stories remain free. We still need what is natural. To become more like trees. To pick up a book and read under a tree. Learn from the trees. (Denilson Baniwa)

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