To be made and to be drawn – the twofold existence of objects

Abstract

In the globalized communication process with written texts on the one hand and images on the other, indigenous artists nowadays participate with their drawings. Among indigenous peoples of the Amazon basin the increasing production of drawings widens the cultural repertoire of myth, poetry, body painting, dance, music, and material culture. As part of a drawing, humans, gods, animals, landscapes, and material objects are then introduced into a new act of intercultural communication: into a reflection on images which opens up new ways of interpretation. The focus of this paper is on indigenous artists who arrange items of daily and ritual use on the given space of a paper sheet and place them in the symbolic contexts of various vivid life scenes. The images do not testify to the objects’ functional but rather to their symbolic meanings. Such representations of objects help to demand and verify the rightness of a once given specific life order under constantly changing life conditions. Drawing things on paper can be seen as the artists’ attempt to open up a new dialogue on the indigenous symbolic production as a whole, of which material culture is an important part. In the article drawings from Tukano, Desâna, Tukuna, Mehinako and Guarani artists are compared and the ways in which objects are presented are analyzed.