Human Wrongs Watch By Mark P. Fancher | Black Agenda Report – TRANSCEND Media Service* Thanksgiving is the quintessential American holiday, in which exceptionalism and selective amnesia are celebrated. The sick fairy tale obscures the violent foundations of a settler colonial nation. United American Indians of New England | Second photo: in homes across the […]
About Barbara Crane Navarro - Rainforest Art Project
I'm a French artist living near Paris.
From 1968 to 1973 I studied at Rhode Island School of Design in Providence, Rhode Island, then at the San Francisco Art Institute in San Francisco, California, for my BFA.
My work for many decades has been informed and inspired by time spent with indigenous communities. Various study trips devoted to the exploration of techniques and natural pigments took me originally to the Dogon of Mali, West Africa, and subsequently to Yanomami communities in Venezuela and Brazil.
Over many years, during the winters, I studied the techniques of traditional Bogolan painting. Hand woven fabric is dyed with boiled bark from the Wolo tree or crushed leaves from other trees, then painted with mud from the Niger river which oxidizes in contact with the dye.
Through the Dogon and the Yanomami, my interest in the multiplicity of techniques and supports for aesthetic expression influenced my artistic practice. The voyages to the Amazon Rainforest have informed several series of paintings created while living among the Yanomami. The support used is roughly woven canvas prepared with acrylic medium then textured with a mixture of sand from the river bank and lava. This supple canvas is then rolled and transported on expeditions into the forest. They are then painted using a mixture of acrylic colors and Achiote and Genipap, the vegetal pigments used by the Yanomami for their ritual body paintings and on practical and shamanic implements.
My concern for the ongoing devastation of the Amazon Rainforest has inspired my films and installation projects. Since 2005, I've created a perfomance and film project - Fire Sculpture - to bring urgent attention to Rainforest issues. To protest against the continuing destruction, I've publicly set fire to my totemic sculptures. These burning sculptures symbolize the degradation of nature and the annihilation of indigenous cultures that depend on the forest for their survival.
It is the same BS colonial narrative that plays out in New Zealand with these kinds of days, that’s a great way of describing it Barbara, selective amnesia, it’s a way of forgetting and white washing history and it’s makes me sad 😔 for my people and all other indigenous peoples for all of their historical suffering 😢 you inspire me every day my dear friend with your support of the Yanomami together we will keep going until our last breathe
Yes, my dear friend, all colonized countries attempt to erase the existence of the original habitants of the lands they stole. 😔
Those of us who recognize this injustice have to fight against it, for Indigenous peoples and all the living world!
Barbara Crane Navarro 
It is the same BS colonial narrative that plays out in New Zealand with these kinds of days, that’s a great way of describing it Barbara, selective amnesia, it’s a way of forgetting and white washing history and it’s makes me sad 😔 for my people and all other indigenous peoples for all of their historical suffering 😢 you inspire me every day my dear friend with your support of the Yanomami together we will keep going until our last breathe
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Yes, my dear friend, all colonized countries attempt to erase the existence of the original habitants of the lands they stole. 😔
Those of us who recognize this injustice have to fight against it, for Indigenous peoples and all the living world!
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