Searching for "Aröbönhipopá": community, cinema and territory among the Xavante

Abstract

According to the anthropologist Els Lagrou, the claim of contemporary indigenous identities involves adherence to a “specific regime of aesthetic production of knowledge”. We will take such a “production regime” as a territory of identitary belonging, in order to think audiovisual practices in an indigenous community of the xavante ethnic group located at the Brazil Central Highlands. We will analyze a mediumlength video that shows a walk of adults and children through their territory, whose final destination is the area of an old village. The site is currently outside the boundaries of the reserve and is occupied by farmers. We will think on the video in the relation between image, memory and territory, this understood as a space at the same time physical,
identitary and imagetic. The film mobilizes the community history within the physical displacement in the territory, to which corresponds a displacement in the time, because it engenders the recovery of a memory. This double displacement projects the gaze to the past of the physical territory (the land), in order to expand the possibilities of access to the symbolic territory (the identity), through the consolidation of an imagetic territory (the film).