NEW / Ernesto Neto and the Huni Kuin – Aru Kuxipa

I will talk a bit here about stories. This is a new story; it is called Aru Kuxipa. It is new, but it is old. Aru Kuxipa to me means our people, the old ones, living together with nature, in balance with our tradition. Aru means secret, sacred. Kuxipa means like a god. – Txana Bane

Ernesto Neto and the Huni Kuin: Aru Kuxipa, an exhibition held at TBA21–Augarten is a vibrant demonstration of the knowledges and voices emerging from the ancestral futures. This term unpacks the potential of creating futures that are deeply rooted in cultures of tradition, by activating processes of exchange and transformation to productively engage with contemporaneity.

The publication outlines the dynamic processes of learning from both tradition and innovation, and the way the unique sensitivities and kinships produced within indigenous cosmovision are an invaluable inspiration for our present moment. Resulting from the multiple exchanges and encounter with members of thirty-two Jordão Huni Kuin communities, Aru Kuxipa brings together various threads from anthropology, art, and science, interwoven, like the movement of a serpent, with the voices of the Huni Kuin people and the plants of forest itself through essay contributions, oral histories, myths, drawings, and traditional songs.