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Mba’ekuaa Jopará

A cosmotechnics of contamination with Guarani and Kaiowá communities in Brazil
Matheus da Rocha Montanari
Traduction(s) :
Mba’ekuaa Jopará [fr]

Résumé

In collaboration with Indigenous communities in Brazil, this artistic research paper develops a cosmotechnics of contamination (Mba’ekuaa Jopará), blending generative VR with ancestral practices. It reconceives digital art as a medium for interspecies dialogue and cosmological action, challenging hegemonic notions of human agency by centering Indigenous epistemologies. Inspired by Amerindian roçados, sites of poetic cultivation where plants are kin, we propose a technobiodiverse artistic practice. Transdisciplinary co-creation contaminates digital art with Indigenous technodiversity, fostering hybrid ecosystems where ancestral knowledge shapes algorithmic agency through a poetics of care.

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Texte intégral

Introduction

  • 1 In this context, the terms Nhanderu and Nhandesy refer to elder community leaders and spiritual gui (...)

1The Guarani and Kaiowá (G&K), among Brazil’s largest Indigenous groups, live mainly in Mato Grosso do Sul. Their struggle stems from a deep physical and spiritual bond with ancestral lands, sustained through the leadership of Nhanderus (male) and Nhandesys (female),1 whose jeroky rituals maintain a dialogue with invisible beings and the guardians of their tekoha [ancestral territories]. Colonization and agribusiness expansion have violently displaced these communities, producing a long history of conflicts (Benites, 2012).

2Scholars describe the situation as one of Brazil’s gravest humanitarian crises, using the term Kaiowcide to capture the systemic violence faced by the G&K (Ioris, 2020). This ethnocide is inseparable from agribusiness-driven environmental destruction, enforced by militias and paramilitary forces. Communities endure deforestation, persecution by ranchers and neo-Pentecostal pastors who burn prayer houses and accuse elders of witchcraft, and the loss of sacred biodiversity threatened by pesticide drift from transgenic crops. These overlapping assaults exemplify Ferdinand’s colonial double fracture (2022) between ecological and social thought, underscoring the urgency of a decolonial ecology perspective.

3The G&K engage their territories through ancestral knowledge that challenges conventional definitions of technology. Chanting, for instance, is a cultivation practice and a technology of multispecies communication (Montanari, 2024). As Yuk Hui (2018) argues, all technology is inseparable from its cosmological context and tied to specific ontologies; technology is therefore always a cosmotechnics. Yet the philosophy of technology has largely privileged its Greek origin in techne, overlooking the fact that while the Greeks were developing their concepts, many others were doing the same. Hui calls for recovering these technodiversities as vital resources for facing present crises.

4Debates on the Anthropocene often frame “human action” as a uniform destructive force (Crutzen & Stoermer, 2017). While stressing planetary impact, this perspective flattens differences and depoliticizes responsibility. By attributing crisis to an abstract “humanity,” it obscures colonial legacies, capitalist extraction, and North-South asymmetries. Critics note that the “human” category is not neutral but Eurocentric, aligned with the figure of the white Western man (Carvalho & Riquito, 2022; Klein, 2014; Moore, 2016).

5Against this backdrop, taking decolonial ecology seriously requires moving beyond static notions of preservation. Hui’s concept of cosmotechnics highlights the plurality of technological worlds, and, with it, the possibility that human action and technology may also generate diversity. This convergence gives rise to what we call technobiodiversity, a framework for imagining diverse relations between technology and life that transcend monolithic understandings of existence.

6To ground this approach, we turn to a collaborative generative art project with G&K communities (Montanari & Sordi, 2023), developed as an instance of a cosmotechnics of contamination. Here, contamination is not derogatory but generative: drawing on Tsing’s “contaminated diversity” (2019), it describes fertile entanglements and unexpected alliances that emerge even within the destructive conditions of the Anthropocene.

1. “Ecologies of thought”

7The “Ecologies of thought” project (2022-2023) brought together G&K elders, anthropologists, biologists, and artists, in partnership with UCL’s Multimedia Anthropology Lab (MAL).2 Emerging from the G&K Virtual Museum,3 it began when two elders using VR headsets (Meta Quest 2) reported encounters with spirits in the virtual space4 (Montanari & Sordi, 2023). In this instance, the Nhandesys were preparing chicha, a traditional corn-based beverage commonly used in rituals, when we proposed that they try the VR headset. Up to that point, they had participated in and guided the construction of the virtual museum, reviewing the 3D modelling process and scene construction, but had only seen it on the screen. The museum was conceived as a traditional territory, featuring a prayer house, a garden, and a lake. The VR experience consisted of a 360° walkthrough of these spaces, accompanied by audio recordings of ritual chanting. While the Nhandesys were exploring the virtual environment, they spontaneously began to chant along. Afterwards, two of the elders shared their impressions with us, describing how they had seen people inside the space. This came as a surprise, as no human figures had been included in the virtual model. They explained that the figures resembled spirits and asked whether the spirits could have entered the VR museum. This revealed the digital environment’s broader affordances for the community, leading to generative VR experiments reimagining cosmic creation from an interspecies perspective rooted in G&K cosmology.

8Here, affordances follow Tim Ingold’s reading of James Gibson, in which perception arises from the organism as a whole in interaction with its environment. This view posits a direct relation with the world, challenging the mediation of signs, and the opposition between representation and interpretation (Ingold, 2018). Perception is immediate, interpretation secondary. Affordances are the ways the world becomes present, not traces of absence. This allows radically different beings (humans, spirits, plants, sounds, and animals) to share the same experiential world. It requires not entering the other’s mind but cultivating shared experiences through which a common world of affordances emerges.

9The plant world was particularly fruitful for developing these experiences. In Amerindian contexts, the cultivated garden [roçado] is not merely a space for cultivating food but an entire poetics of care (Montanari, 2024). Across various Indigenous cosmologies, plants are seen and treated as persons (Cabral de Oliveira et al., 2020), a relationship usually mediated by guardian spirits (Fausto, 2008).

10Thus, the poetics of care unfolds between two poles: caring for and being careful with. While cultivated fields prioritize crop diversity, one must also exercise caution and attend to the needs of each plant-person. Neglect may anger crops like sweet potatoes, causing them to migrate or curse cultivators with illness (Morim De Lima, 2018).

11Rather than domestication, Indigenous worlds involve anti-domestication, familiarization, or counter-domestication to describe complex vegetal relations (Aparicio, 2019; Carneiro da Cunha, 2017; Fausto & Neves, 2018). Plants thus constitute a field of negotiations and conflicts mediated by shamans and rituals (Shiratori, 2019).

12Though unfamiliar to Western thought, this life-cultivating poetics yields tangible results. Traditional practices sustain much of global biodiversity. Indigenous lands, covering 28.1% of Earth, are in better ecological condition than surrounding areas, providing essential environmental services. Today, these practices are increasingly recognized as vital technologies in addressing climate issues (Coomes et al., 2015; Emperaire, 2020; Garnett et al., 2018; Graeub et al., 2016).

2. Chanting as a cultivation and interspecific communication technology

13In the G&K context, plant-human-spirit relations are mediated by chanting as interspecies communication. The deity Jakairá created the first cultivated field and white corn: the primordial food of life. Its cultivation involves rituals like the Jerosy Puku [corn baptism], which renders it healthy for consumption and reinforces more-than-human ties through all-night ceremonies of alternating chants (João Kaiowá, 2020). Sadly, this corn faces extinction risks due to pesticides from neighboring transgenic crops and climate change impacts (Benites et al., 2021).

14Drawing on creation and technical narratives, we chose corn for our first artistic experiment. Community members explained that corn has its own sound, audible only to some. But before harvest, as corn releases a scent to attract bees, the bees emit the plant’s sound rather than their own, signaling ripeness. Like a bee chanting, this sound acts as interspecies communication between plant and cultivator.

3. Cultivating a Guarani and Kaiowá virtual reality

15A Nhandesy explained that, in Kaiowá mythology, sun and moonlight were primordial technologies. Inspired by this, our first VR experiment, developed with the software TouchDesigner, analyzed light patterns from cornfield images to generate 3D topographies, while bee recordings mixed with algorithmic noise animated the terrain in real time—evoking a world in perpetual genesis. Figure 1 shows: (a) input image; (b) light analysis; (c) peaks from bright areas, depressions from dark; (d) parallel audio analysis; (e) terrain animated by sound.

16Over three months of biweekly meetings, community members selected images and gave feedback, elders shared cosmological insights, and MAL members introduced generative techniques (Galanter, 2016). After presenting partial results online, we finalized the experiments during a two-week field residency.

17Rather than simulating mythic narration, the work embodied corn, bees, and G&K cosmology through intermedial data, creating common ground between those who could and could not hear the corn’s sound. Though non-naturalistic, the community welcomed it, affirming that it blended G&K elements with non-Indigenous technologies, recognizing how the generated images resonated with their cosmology through a non-traditional medium.

Figure 1

Figure 1

Corn, bees, Jakairá and the creation of the roçado. The image illustrates the generative process behind the construction of the VR experience. First, (a) an input image of a cornfield was introduced into the system. Then, (b) this image was projected onto a 3D surface, where the system performed a light-incision analysis across its different areas. (c) Regions with higher light incidence were mapped as elevations, while darker areas were interpreted as depressions, forming a digital terrain. Simultaneously, (d) the software analyzed the frequency and amplitude of a recording of native bees. Finally, (e) the variations in sound were used to generate movement within the terrain.

Author: Matheus da Rocha Montanari, 2025.

18Further experiments incorporated images of the Chiru, a wooden cross that sustains the world and heals illnesses, combined with sound compositions from thunder recordings, whose guardian-spirit is tied to creation [fig. 2]. In G&K cosmology, chants are embedded in the Chiru’s materiality: it upholds the Earth, regulates natural balance, and originally supported the universe, which emerged as a disk formed from its essence (Mura, 2010).

19Like white corn, the Chiru faces threats. Communities suffer attacks from ranchers and neo-Pentecostal pastors, who accuse the elders of witchcraft and burn their prayer houses (Torres, 2019). Beyond the violence, they threaten profound consequences: failure to care for the Chiru risks triggering imbalances and disease, affecting both the community and the wider land. This dynamic reveals how their poetics of care intertwines ethics and politics, where sustaining life demands reciprocal vigil.

Figure 2

Figure 2

Thunder and the cross that sustains the world. Similar to the previous experience, this iteration followed the same structure, incorporating images of Chiru wood and recordings of thunder.

Author: Matheus da Rocha Montanari, 2025.

4. Augmented chanting

20The clearest example of the cosmotechnics of contamination occurred in a tragic moment of violence against the community. On June 24, 2022, while we were in territory, the Guapo’y Mirin Massacre occurred as a coordinated attack by ranchers, police, and paramilitaries on an Indigenous land reclamation area, resulting in the assassination of Vitor Fernandes, injuries to dozens, and the burning of the territory.

21Afterward, the elders asked us to record a chant to calm the land. Using the generative system, images of the burning territory were transformed by the elders’ chant frequencies, reshaping the massacre into a new virtual terrain in formation [fig. 3]. Unable to be physically present, the elders acted from a distance, as chanting can operate across multiple dimensions, independent of location.

Figure 3

Figure 3

The augmented chanting used images of the burning territory and the sound recording of the elder’s chanting to calm down the earth after the attack.

Author: Matheus da Rocha Montanari, 2025.

22The generative system acted as “augmented chanting,” in which the virtuality of the ritual and the algorithm acted directly upon the image of the territory [fig. 4]. More than a symbolic gesture, it constitutes a cosmotechnics of contamination that reconfigures the relationship between image, territory, and care. In this case, the virtual dimension is not a simulation or detachment, but a sensitive extension of the ritual gesture, capable of reconfiguring perception and intervening in the process of reestablishing the territory’s more-than-human connections.

Figure 4

Figure 4

Still from the VR experience.

Author: Multimedia Anthropology Lab, UCL. Source: www.uclmal.com

5. Mba’ekuaa Jopará

23The concept of Mba’ekuaa Jopará emerged as a result of this long collaboration. Rooted in Guarani thought, it joins Mba’ekuaa [technology, know-how] with Jopará [mixing, contamination], a term also used to describe multiethnic people and the cross-pollination of corn varieties. Yet this notion of contamination, much like the one from Tsing (2019), must not be confused with the logic of the Plantationcene, which thrives on eradication rather than the cultivation of diversity. In that regime, contaminated diversities are replaced by transgenic homogenization and the endless replication of monocultures.

24The Jopará contamination refers to a fertile, situated mixing of knowledges, bodies, and technologies in which encounters expansion of the perceptible, instead of erasure. It is contamination with care, rejecting homogenization and affirming multiplicity as a source of generative potential.

25Tsing (2019) revitalizes the concept of sustainability, long diluted by reductionist discourses, by linking it to the resurgence of multispecies livability through diverse assemblies. Similarly, the contamination of virtual reality with G&K cosmology works in reverse: rather than assimilating Indigenous knowledge into a digital frame, it expands VR itself into a space of technobiodiversity for more-than-human encounter and action.

26From Amerindian roças [plantations], we learn that nature is neither a separate, idealized, nor primordial entity, but rather the product of cultivation grounded in a poetics of care. Thus, localized and specific human action fosters diversity, directly challenging the homogenizing notion of destructive “humanity.”

  • 5 The notion of thought monoculture, as discussed by Krenak et al. (2015), refers to the modern tende (...)

27Indigenous thought provides an essential framework for reimagining the relations between art and technology, particularly when confronting “environmental preservation” discourses that remain bound to modern separations of culture and nature. Recognizing it as the sophisticated and legitimate philosophical system it constitutes is fundamental to this rethinking. This process of contamination is likewise rooted in the poetics of care: it simultaneously nurtures symbiotic alliances while tending against the proliferation of a thought monoculture (Krenak et al., 2015).5

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Notes

1 In this context, the terms Nhanderu and Nhandesy refer to elder community leaders and spiritual guides within guarani-kaiowá social organization. They should not be mistaken for the spiritual entities that share the same names in some guarani cosmology.

2 Project members: Matheus Montanari, Valdineia Aquino, Scott Hill, Luan Iturve, Germano Alziro, Jaqueline Gonçalves, Fabi Fernandes, Raffaella Fryer-Moreira, Gerard Oliver, Adriana Boloc, Karola Braga, Anderson Santos, Caetano Sordi, Stephanie Ferraz, Clara Ciqueira, Luiza Braga. Under the supervision of Nhandesys—Neuza Alziro, Ivone, Fausta Solano Mendosa, Roselí Aquino—Nhanderus—Tadeu Romeiro Freita, Valdomiro Oswaldo Aquino. See: https://www.matheusmontanari.com/ecologiesofthought (access 25 August 2025).

3 See: https://www.uclmal.com/virtual-museum (access 25 August 2025).

4 See: https://youtu.be/tHKLh00y-GM (access 25 August 2025).

5 The notion of thought monoculture, as discussed by Krenak et al. (2015), refers to the modern tendency to impose a single, dominant way of thinking, erasing the diversity of cosmologies and epistemologies.

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Table des illustrations

Titre Figure 1
Légende Corn, bees, Jakairá and the creation of the roçado. The image illustrates the generative process behind the construction of the VR experience. First, (a) an input image of a cornfield was introduced into the system. Then, (b) this image was projected onto a 3D surface, where the system performed a light-incision analysis across its different areas. (c) Regions with higher light incidence were mapped as elevations, while darker areas were interpreted as depressions, forming a digital terrain. Simultaneously, (d) the software analyzed the frequency and amplitude of a recording of native bees. Finally, (e) the variations in sound were used to generate movement within the terrain.
URL http://journals.openedition.org/hybrid/docannexe/image/6779/img-1.png
Fichier image/png, 692k
Titre Figure 2
Légende Thunder and the cross that sustains the world. Similar to the previous experience, this iteration followed the same structure, incorporating images of Chiru wood and recordings of thunder.
Crédits Author: Matheus da Rocha Montanari, 2025.
URL http://journals.openedition.org/hybrid/docannexe/image/6779/img-2.png
Fichier image/png, 623k
Titre Figure 3
Légende The augmented chanting used images of the burning territory and the sound recording of the elder’s chanting to calm down the earth after the attack.
Crédits Author: Matheus da Rocha Montanari, 2025.
URL http://journals.openedition.org/hybrid/docannexe/image/6779/img-3.png
Fichier image/png, 751k
Titre Figure 4
Légende Still from the VR experience.
Crédits Author: Multimedia Anthropology Lab, UCL. Source: www.uclmal.com
URL http://journals.openedition.org/hybrid/docannexe/image/6779/img-4.png
Fichier image/png, 1,0M
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Matheus da Rocha Montanari, « Mba’ekuaa Jopará »Hybrid [En ligne], 15 | 2026, mis en ligne le 15 avril 2026, consulté le 08 mai 2026. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/hybrid/6779 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/162zc

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Auteur

Matheus da Rocha Montanari

Artist and researcher, Matheus da Rocha Montanari holds a PhD in fine arts from the University of São Paulo. He is part of the Poéticas Digitais group and the Multimedia Anthropology Lab (University College London). Currently, he is a Leonardo – ASU Imagination fellow. https://matheusmontanari.com

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