A new exhibition at the Masaryk University Faculty of Science presents the fabric artwork of the menire, the women of the Mebengokré-Xikrin people indigenous to the Brazilian Amazon.
Entitled “Menire nhõ kubēkà ôk: Mebengokré women with their painted fabrics”, the exhibition has created by the menire themselves,in collaboration with the Department of Anthropology at the MUNI Faculty of Science, the Centro studi Americanistici “Circolo Amerindiano” in Perugia, Italy, and the Brazilian Embassy in Prague.
In the exhibition, a series of paintings created by the women introduce their lived experience of body painting and the contemporary artistic production of painted fabrics. These artworks are presented alongside photographs of the women in their houses and villages, with audio elements allowing visitors to access their daily life of socialising, of care, and of resistance. The exhibition is on display in Pavilion 2 of the Department of Anthropology at the MUNI Faculty of Science, Kotlářská 2, from 26 September until the end of the academic year in June 2025.
The Mebengokré-Xikrin live in the Trincheira Bacajá Indigenous Territory, located in the state of Pará in the Brazilian Amazon. Their land is situated along the banks of the Bacajá River, a tributary of the Xingu River. It was demarcated in 1996, covering 1,650,939 hectares. Currently, the Mebengokré-Xikrin are divided into 32 villages, with a population of around 2,200 people, over 10% of whom are women engaged in crafting.
The Mebengokré-Xikrin people are directly affected by the Belo Monte Hydroelectric Dam, one of the largest hydroelectric installations in the world, which has profoundly impacted the ecology and seasonal patterns of the Xingu River and its tributaries, including the Bacajá River, disrupting the lives of indigenous people in the surrounding areas. This has been widely criticised as a case of environmental racism, which refers to actions that disproportionately harm ethnic groups by destabilizing their social and cultural contexts, leading to severe environmental injustices.
The Mebengokré-Xikrin express their social life with the use of body painting, an exclusively female activity that survives today. Women painters always present themselves by having one hand stained black with genipap, embodying their use of this natural colour, and the other hand left uncoloured. They paint their husbands, children, and relatives at home, as well as joining together in public at collective reciprocal painting sessions.
The paints are made from genipap and batprãam, a tree bark collected from the forest, which is burned to create charcoal. They open the genipaps with a machete, remove the pulp, and mix it with charcoal and sips of water held in the mouth and spat out, forming a black paste. This paste is applied to the hands, spread with a kyoky, a thin palm stick taken from the forest, and successively applied on the body.
Paintings are done regularly, for gatherings, rituals, welcoming guests into their homes, enhancing their appearance, or for death and war, among other reasons. The Mebengokré-Xikrin’s ability to extract what alters their bodies from nature marks their social identities and belonging. The black colour distinguishes them, while red represents the external world. Body painting is an activity focused on body modification, serving to beautify and protect against the sun and insect bites, and meanwhile is also a way to express the person’s position in the world and society; it is a form of expression.
In more recent years, the menire, the Mebengokré-Xikrin women, started to create painted fabrics on which they apply the patterns used in body painting. This activity enables them to disseminate their artworks as an act of resistance in face of the pressure they are suffering from the wider society. Affected by the socio-environmental modifications caused by the Belo Monte Hydroelectric Dam, as well as by persistent erasure from five centuries of colonial advancement of the frontier of the Amazon Forest, they mobilise their social expression to gain visibility and voice. The paintings allow the menire to make their lives and presence visible and to affirm their social and cultural resistance.
This exhibition presents a collection of Mebengokré-Xikrin graphic designs painted on raw cotton fabric using black acrylic paint. Skillfully created by menire, these patterns are traditionally intended for sale to a non-Indigenous audience. Each piece is accompanied by the artist’s name, the village where she lives, photos of the artist, and an audio explanation of the painting’s deeper meaning. Visitors will join a sensory immersion into the world of Mebengokré-Xikrin graphics, where visualization, sound, and interpretation intertwine, offering a poetic experience that connects to the forest’s traditions and stories in a unique and engaging way.
