Livia Melzi

This project question the meaning of archives in museum and the place that images have in the power relations between the European and the Brazilian territory. This visual story follows the last cloaks of the Tupinambá tribe – artefacts used during anthropophagy rituals – all conserved in Europeans institutions. The images invite the public to confront the visual discourse behind the policy of conservation and non-return for these artefacts. A second act highlights the images made by the museums and some other historical personages, as Johan Maurits, who initiated the transfer of the cloaks. By bringing up the flow of the archive, the images perform a meta-archive, and the photograph can be read as a contact zone: between the artist and the archive, between the images and the indigenous people, between our memory of museum visitors and our little practice of visiting their archives.