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Graduate Topics in Film – Indigenous Praxis, Indigenous Life
240 002 | CCN: 32444
Location: Dwinelle 226
Date and Time: W 2:00pm - 4:59pm
4 Units
This seminar focuses on the study of contemporary Indigenous thought in the Americas of the last 40 years to re-signify, in a non-western, non-capitalist framework the meaning of what we understand as art practices: film, media, drawing, writing etc. The course will put a special emphasis in the concept of life and its praxis in indigenous communities, in particular the understanding of our world as a world of relationality, where human communities are not ontologically separated from nature, where the relations inside these communities and with their environment are relations of equilibrium, and not of extraction, destruction or quantified exchange. In this new framework, in the natural and human ecosystem, art praxis acquires new meaning and relevance, for it is not entirely centered on producing “objects” of art separated from the world, nor is it understood through the lenses of representation or abstraction.
We will read texts by Ailton Krenak, Davi Kopenawa Yanomami, Candace Hopkins, Elisa Loncón, Melanie K. Yazzie, Moira Millán, Naine Terena, Nick Estes, Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, and Yasnaya Aguilar as we study the praxis of Denilson Baniwa, Jaider Esbel, Patricia Ferreira Pará Yxapy, Sebastián Calfuqueo, Sky Hopinka, Suely Maxacali, Wendy Red Star among others.