The Amazon as a mirror of ignorance and invisibility

Abstract

This article reflects on the Amazon as a symbolic and political space in dispute. Its objective is to highlight how artistic practices, especially contemporary Indigenous art, function as resistance to historical invisibility and structural violence imposed by colonial and capitalist visions. The adopted methodology involved bibliographic review and qualitative analysis based on the experience reports of two Amazonian researchers: one with urban experience and the other Indigenous. The Amazon is presented as a periphery of the global capitalist system, often reduced to a “demographic void” or “resource reserve” by external views that reproduce the coloniality of power. This logic generates epistemological and physical violence, dehumanizing traditional peoples and rendering invisible, including, the urban Amazon. Faced with this oppression, art emerges as a powerful instrument of contestation and production of counter-hegemonic knowledge, affirming identities and challenging power structures. Contemporary Indigenous art, in particular, constitutes a field of visibility, weaving the ancestral and the current to denounce threats to the territory and the future. Thus, art is understood as a political act of affirmation and liberation from the “Eurocentric mirror.”