We continue in an incessant search for a place in history

Amuamas, Juliana Notari and ecofeminism

Abstract

The article proposes a reflection on the videoperformance Amuamas, performed by the Brazilian artist Juliana Notari in the Brazilian Amazon in 2018. We start from the epistemological premises of ecofeminism, which take the female body as an index of an association between the feminine and nature and between Mother Earth and the primary forest. This investigative practice opposes the masculine and patriarchal notion of culture, which, by proposing itself as hegemonic and universal, has for millennia positioned Woman and Nature as matters of exploitation. We outline a brief overview of the emergence of feminist art history, a field in which artist and work are inserted, denouncing the traditional narrative of
history and especially of art history, which excludes those oppressed by capitalism. Next, we move on to the analysis of the work in an effort of reflection that places it as a denunciation of oppressive relations based on an idea of heterosexual coloniality of power and on the concealment of histories of violence against the Others, that is, against the female Other and the Other Nature. We conclude by reiterating that the Amuamas represent the artist’s encounter with the forest, but not only, since the forest represents all the women and all the Others, killed or oppressed by coloniality/modernity, by
the white, European and Christian man.