“Page/tile #0114: Xetas” by Josely Carvalho
Title:
- Page/tile #0114: Xetas
Artist(s) and People Involved:
Exhibiting Artist(s):
Symposium:
Venue(s):
Medium:
- Two channel video installation
Artist Statement:
Page/tile # 0114: Xetas, a real-time two channel video installation portraits the extinction of an indigenous tribe from Southern Brazil. My father, a coffee farmer with a large number of japonese families working on it, used to tell me stories about the day he first saw a group of indians, not yet colonized. At that time, late fifties, the Xeths were first identified by the scientific community as a group of indians living in a stone age state. I went back to the Paran region and most of the Araucaria pine trees, a hard wood tree taking 150 years to mature, were also not there anymore, I captured only the cattle grazing on an empty land. Today, forty years later, the Araucaria pine trees are scarce and the Xeths are extinct. The video monitor broadcasts the short news left from this vanished culture.
I remember as a child, to look for hours the tall and lonely Araucaria Pine trees in southern Brazil.
I have heard there is one member of the tribe still alive and living in a mental hospital of a small town in southern Brazil. This installation inserts the presence of this individual, perhaps, a female, through a video projection. The digital image constructs the labyrinth of this woman’s psyche as I find, working in the computer, the maze of our isolation.
