Huni Kuin Laboratory: Ritual and art, performance and video, body and image

Abstract

Huni Kuin Laboratory is an artistic-ethnographic research project developed from a field study on artistic practices in rituals of the Huni Kuin Indigenous people in Acre (Western Amazonia, Brazil). It articulates the ritual performance of the Other, the ritual performance of the Self while researching the Other, and what is common in both. It focuses on how to develop an artistic language that establishes an analogy with shamanic ritual dynamics, namely at the level of the relationship between consciousness, body, and image. The Huni Kuin ritual performance links the "forest cinema" (Gow, 1995) of ayahuasca
with geometric visual aesthetics (kene) and musical aesthetics (huni meka). Its artisticdocumentary recording on video is a meta-performance of ritual performance. Performative approaches are thus "simultaneously subject and method" (Conquergood, 1989: 82). The filmed and edited images work as an axial metaphor that incorporates an Amerindian ontology of "two and its multiple" (Lima, 1996). To summarize, intersecting theory and practice, the goal is to reflect on the relationship between the moving image and the ritualized movement of the performative search of the Self and the Other, considering aesthetics, myths, and archetypes. This happens in a field of experimentation between art as ritual [...].