The Power of Plants: Viruses, Healing and Amazonian Indigenous Art 

Wednesday 23 October, 5.15pm, Fine Art seminar room, KEVII Building

Giuliana Borea (Newcastle University), The Power of Plants: Viruses, Healing and Amazonian Indigenous Art 

Drawing on the work of Amazonian indigenous artist Harry Pinedo-Inin Metsa, “Our Plants, Our Oxygen. Lung Healing” and other works by Pinedo and Santiago Yahuarcani featured in the exhibition Ite/Neno/Aquí: Respuestas al Covid 19, this talk explores the role that plants played in helping to defeat, and cure, Covid-19 in the Amazon.

Focusing on the pandemic, I show how networks of help and knowledge between people, plants, animals and other beings, in what is understood as an extended humanity, occurred through dreams, “mareaciones” and various forms of mobility; and I explain the role of art in this set of exchanges, synaesthesia, and translations and what I call “agents of interface”. I argue that just as scientific visualization techniques offered an image of COVID-19, indigenous art offered a visualization of COVID-19 in the Amazon, and of its forms and agents of healing and care. 

While this presentation concerns the power of plants, it distances itself from recent exhibitions on ayahuasca art in Europe and the UK which I argue re-fuel the exoticism and “primitivist” consumption of the Amazon for a European audience, particularly at a time of global interest in indigenous art.

Giuliana Borea is an anthropologist and Senior Lecturer in Latin American Studies at Newcastle University. Her research concerns the different epistemologies of art; the political economy of contemporary art; museum politics and practices; place-making and sensory knowledge with a focus on Peru and the Amazon. She has been Peru’s Director of Museums and Cultural Heritage, Coordinator of the Lima Contemporary Art Museum, and has curated various exhibition of indigenous art. She is co-convenor of the Anthropology and Art Network (AntArt) of the European Association of Social Anthropologists. She is the editor of Arte y Antropología: Estudios, Encuentros y Nuevos Horizontes (PUCP 2017), co-editor of Antropologías Visuales Latinoamericanas: Estudios, Genealogías y Enseñanza (FLACSO, 2024) and the author of Configuring the New Lima Art Scene: An Anthropological Analysis of Contemporary Art in Latin America (Routledge, 2021), recently translated into Spanish as La nueva escena artística de Lima. Prácticas, museos y mercado.