Tupi or not Tupi

Lívia Melzi offers a visual investigation of the representation of Tupinambá cloaks originally used in anthropophagic rituals by the Tupi warrior tribes who lived along the Brazilian coast. In doing so, she sheds light on the discourses constructed around these objects, which are today relegated to the reserves of European museums, whilst at the same time bringing together French arts de la table with anthropophagy.

The title of the exhibition originates from the famous manifesto that became the founding concept of Brazilian modernist thought, in which Oswald de Andrade wrote: “Tupi or not Tupi, that is the question”. This emblematic quote (in English in the text), is as much a celebration of the Tupi and their ritual practices as it is a metaphorical example of cannibalism.

The artist’s practice centres on the archive, on memory and on the construction of identity from quasi-documentary images. She uses photography to interrogate the mechanisms that underpin the production, conservation and circulation of images. Her various projects, that have investigated subjects from the little-known figure of Hercules Florence (a pioneer of photography in Brazil) to the construction of European museum collections, all look at the history and the place of representations inherited from the colonial era.

In 2018, she began a research project around Tupinambá cloaks, which originated from the Tupi warrior tribes who were decimated following their first contacts with Europeans in the 16^th century. Today, the descendants of the Tupi survive in the threatened rainforests of the Amazon. Only eight of these cloaks, which were originally used for anthropophagic rituals and subsequently brought to Europe in the 17^th century, exist today, locked away in the reserves of seven European institutions.