The following article is published in PARSE Journal, Issue 8: Exclusion.
Carmézia Emiliano: Wazaka’ (2016)
Carmézia Emiliano’s painting Wazaka´ (2016) depicts a huge tree, heavy with fruits of all shapes and colours, the ground around it also covered with fruit. The tree is the tree of all fruits, the world tree, or Wazaka’, a centre of the world for the Macuxi and other Carib-speaking people in the borderlands between Brazil, Venezuela and Guyana. In the painting, men and animals surround the tree’s trunk. But while the animals are happily feeding from the fallen fruit, the men’s gazes are turned towards the top, and in their hands they are holding axes. The moment depicted, immediately preceding the cutting down of Wazaka’, is a crucial one in indigenous narratives from the Monte Roraima area. Behind the tree in Emiliano’s painting, which brings the very beginning of time together with the present, is the characteristic silhouette of Monte Roraima, the stump-like plateau mountain that will be the only thing left when the axes have done their job. Continue reading …