Amazonian Cinema and Human-Nonhuman Assemblages. Reflections on Ecocide and the Affordances and Limitations of Collaborative (Art) Cinema

Friday December 5, 2025 1:45PM-3:30PM

The Doris Z. Stone Latin American Library and Research Center Seminar Room (Howard-Tilton Memorial Library, 4th Floor)

Session Abstract

Much scholarship on art, the Anthropocene, and the unfolding ecological catastrophe we are already experiencing, seeks to account for how creative works, including cinema, might help reorient or sensitize

audiences to the inseparability of what “the moderns” have distinguished as humans and nature. Many find inspiration in the scholarship of science criticism – the work of Jane Bennett and Bruno Latour, Donna Haraway and Anna Tsing – who offer rich reflections on human-nonhuman assemblages. Others turn to Jason W. Moore’s indictment of capitalism’s early colonial and still ongoing exploitative and destructive forms of putting nature to work. Indigenous epistemologies are less frequently invoked in these reflections. Viveiros de Castro’s work on perspectivism, for example, allows us to complicate the idea that Indigenous Amazonians do not differentiate humans and nonhumans. This panel explores the way Amazonian cinemas and television series obfuscate or draw attention to Indigenous conceptualizations of human-nonhuman relations. We ask, what are the challenges to collaborating with Indigenous communities in the productions and disseminations of documentary and docufictions? What notions of environmental justice arise when Indigenous epistemologies are obfuscated or when they find their way into film? What kind of redistribution of the sensible might this particular politics of aesthetics afford for thinking about ecocriticism?

Farides Lugo Zuleta (University of California Riverside), “Responsabilidad epistémica: Locura colonial, degradación de la futuridad y circulación del conocimiento ancestral en El abrazo de la serpiente (2015)”

El abrazo de la serpiente de Ciro Guerra es una “river movie” que sigue la historia de relacionamiento de Karamakate, un indígena cohiuano aislado, y Theodor von Martius, un científico alemán que ha caído gravemente enfermo en medio de su expedición por la Amazonía y espera curarse con la planta sagrada yakruna; en forma de trenza con saltos temporales el agua del río nos muestra la historia del mismo Karamakate ya mayor y acechado por la desmemoria de sus tradiciones y el expedicionista estadounidense Evan, especie de actualización de von Martius, pero con motivaciones más oscuras y extractivistas en su viaje. La película oscilará entre ambas historias-momentos de Karamakate creando un universo masculino de relaciones de poder e intercambio muy antropocéntricas, que indagan principalmente, como lo señala Martina Bruner (2021), por una mirada anticolonial de la selva en contraposición a la “locura colonial”, mientras resalta lo inseparable de la violencia social y la violencia ecológica. Siguiendo a Ana María Mutis (2018), me interesa ahondar en el mensaje que la película parece dejarnos sobre una democratización del conocimiento como ejercicio de “salvación” para el territorio amazónico. Sin embargo, me pregunto: ¿se hace justicia epistémica al cargar al personaje de Karamakate de la responsabilidad de transmitir-compartir el conocimiento ancestral de su pueblo con los “hombres de ciencia blancos” en tránsito exploratorio por el Amazonas? ¿Qué implicaciones ético-ambientales conlleva representar a Karamakate como el último poseedor de ese legado mientras lidia con el “vanishing native trope” a lo largo de todo el filme?

Freya Schiwy (University of California Riverside, chair and moderator), “The Sound of Silence. Thinking Through Ecocide and Assemblage in Dusk Chorus (2017)”

Dusk Chorus centers on David Monacchi’s environmental art project “Fragments of Extinction” and the sound research he conducts in Huaorani territory in the Ecuadorian Amazon. Like “Fragments of Extinction,” this documentary invites viewers to immerse ourselves in a stunning acoustic and visual experience: the sounds of the tropical forest and the silences, the absence of life, brought on by extensive drought linked to climate change and fossil of fuel extractivism. The film, in other words, draws our attention to ecocide and to what, alongside much scholarly work on environmental art, we might want to call an “assemblage” or a “collective”, enabled by Monacchi’s innovative sound recording technology as well as the documentary’s aesthetics. Latour’s concept of the “collective” might help theorize the documentary (and the art project’s) focus on the interrelationship of humans, forest, and apparatuses while Jane Bennet’s notion of “assemblage” would help express the agency of matter and the necessary parts that facilitate the heightening of our acoustic senses. Neither concept, however, can quite account for the documentary’s brief glimpses, but glimpses nonetheless, of the Huaorani guides who accompany Monacchi in his search for the sounds of life in what Monacchi calls the last remaining “undisturbed” rainforests. This paper explores how a focus Indigenous epistemology that centers the idea of human-nonhuman relatives and epistemologies of mutual care might help shed light on the affordances and limitations of Dusk Chorus’s aesthetics and the concept of assemblage for our understanding of ecocide.

Jorge Marcone (Rutgers University), “Amazonian Ontologies and Ecocides from the Past: Ancient Builders of the Amazon (2025), and Amazônia, Arqueologia da Floresta (2022, 2024)”

In this presentation, I will discuss Ancient Builders of the Amazon (Dir. Graham Townsley), a PBS/NOVA episode first aired on February 15, 2023, and the Brazilian series Amazônia, Arqueologia da Floresta with two seasons of four episodes each that aired in 2022 and 2024 respectively. As both television documentaries introduce viewers to the academic and public impact of recent Amazonian archaeology, their aesthetics raise questions about the persistence of academic extractivism in the environmental humanities and in documentary film, and about the challenges of accepting and respecting Indigenous ontologies and epistemologies. Foundational works by Viveiros de Castro and Descola, coincide with a shift in Amazonian archaeology, well represented by Eduardo Góes Neves, where archeology stops conceiving of the forest as the privileged space of agency for non-human beings and asserts that for thousands of years the forest itself has been created by the complex interaction between humans and non-humans. The loss of those ancient civilizations means the collapse of complex social-ecological systems, and that the current forest is, in a way, the remains of an ecocide. This shift sparked considerable controversy at the time due to fears that the assertion that Amazonia had housed large ‘urban’ populations would promote colonial expansion. The series thus grapple with the weight of two legacies in the imagery about the Amazon. One is the myth of “lost civilizations.” The other asserts the importance of evidence against common stereotypes about the Amazon.

Bárbara Galindo (University of California Riverside), “Sobre la humanidad originaria y el genocidio de ‘urihi a’ o ‘tierra-bosque’ en A Última Floresta (2021)”

El largometraje documental A Última Floresta (2021), dirigido por Luiz Bolognesi y coescrito por Bolognesi y el chamán y activista yanomami Davi Kopenawa, se centra en la resistencia cosmopolítica de los chamanes yanomami frente a la expansión de la minería de oro y el uso contaminante del mercurio. Como sugiere el título de la película, la lucha yanomami no se limita a la defensa del territorio demarcado en 1992, sino a la supervivencia del bosque tropical más grande del planeta, el “urihi a” o “tierra-bosque”. Este trabajo examina los alcances y limitaciones de la “estética cosmopolítica” (Martin, 2024) de la película a la hora de construir la perspectiva y agencia de los no-humanos con el fin de desestabilizar los regímenes visuales antropocéntricos colonial/modernos que autorizan la destrucción de “urihi a”. Si las relaciones entre humanos y no-humanos forman la base del pensamiento amerindio, así como la creencia en una humanidad originaria escondida como esencia dentro de la envoltura corporal de todas las entidades vivientes (Viveiros de Castro, 2004), el exterminio de la “tierra-bosque” puede ser visto como un genocidio (Hubbard, 2014). En este sentido, me interesa discutir, además, qué imágenes y conceptualizaciones yanomami emergen para definir tanto las tácticas acumulativas de violencia que escapan a la noción de genocidio, como la red de relaciones evocadas en conceptos como ensamblaje, colectivo, socio-naturaleza, entre otros.