More Yanomami & Trees! And the artivist Jaider Esbell? – MORE ART of GREENWASHING by the MERCHANTS of GOLD – in their own words… Another Cartier “art” travesty!?

« Letter to the Old World

Genocide Indigenous Brazil

Violence is a long cycle. Ancient orders continue to echo and have now arrived in the world’s last virgin forests.

The order? Exterminate! »

Jaider Esbell said: « As Indigenous people, we have already come from a historic process of the end of the world. »

« Letter to the Old World » is part of a visual narrative denouncing the horrors that Indigenous peoples suffered and are still suffering in Brazil and articulating the necessity for the decolonization of museums and other symbolic institutions and spaces.

« I am rich! And do you know where my wealth comes from? Comes from the indigenous lands of the Amazon rainforest. Yes, that’s where I’m from. In order for me to look beautiful, the Indians must die naked and have nothing! »

In one of his final interviews Jaider Esbell criticized art institutions for not integrating Indigenous art into national and global art history. « There is no dialogue, » he said. « The biennial takes your work and forgets you. »

After Jaider Esbell’s death by suicide, his friend, the renowned Indigenous artist Denilson Baniwa, published in an open letter: « Given that the reception the occidental world gave us led one of us to such a grave end, I need to think more about what type of relationship I want to have with occidental art. »

**« Letter from the Indigenous Peoples to Capitalism » Performance (2019)**

In this performance Jaider Esbell delivered a letter to a UBS Bank in Geneva, Switzerland, that outlined the rights of all to live on a healthy planet and criticized bank policies that are complicit with deforestation and criminal ecocide.

**« Urucum »**
**Performance with urucum, natural red dye, in the water at the Monument to « O Garimpeiro » (The Gold Prospector) in Boa Vista, Roraima, Brazil** **(2019)**
– **Jaider Esbell**

Jaider Esbell’s Artivism: Artistic resistance against gold mining in Indigenous Lands, the destruction of the forest and the continued attack on Indigenous cultures…

In the decades-long continuity of greenwashing the gold jewelry, watches and accessories company that created and underwrites them, the Fondation Cartier presented yet another “nature” oriented exhibition Les Vivants (Living Worlds) as part of lille3000, Utopia – “Utopia”? – at the Tripostal in Lille, France through October 2, 2022 that featured Jaider Esbell’s work.

But, “Utopia”? In Thomas More’s “Utopia,”published in 1516, gold and precious stones have no value. Indeed, they carry the weight of blood, slavery and human madness

Cartier stated: “thus extends a series of exhibitions by the Fondation Cartier questioning the place that Western man has arrogated to himself at the top of an alleged pyramid of the living and peoples.”

According to the Cartier Foundation, the exhibition “proposes to transport our imagination beyond anthropocentrism in order to reinvent, with empathy and humility, a new earthly cohabitation with plants and animals.”

They added that “The heart of the exhibition is a collection of works by contemporary Amerindian artists… Their experience of a relationship of parity between living beings, humans and non-humans, constitutes an immemorial tradition from which we have everything to learn in this time of ecological crisis. ” And that the Cartier Foundation “has been developing a program for more than twenty years that explores the major current ecological issues… which invite us to take a renewed look at the beauty and vulnerability of the living world.”

The curators of this exhibition were Bruce Albert, anthropologist and consultant for Cartier and Hervé Chandès, Artistic General Director of the Cartier Foundation.

I wondered how Jaider Esbell – who defined himself as an ‘artivist’ and used his creative genius to express a militant critique of the hegemonic culture of colonization and its concept of art as a weapon in the struggle for Indigenous rights to land and cultural recognition – would react when seeing his works being used by the Cartier company – the purveyor of luxury gold and diamond jewelery, watches and accessories – for their manipulative objectives; greenwashing their brand?

Jaider Esbell’s friends and fellow Indigenous artivists in Brazil told me that he would have refused to participate in Cartier‘s abject pretense that gold industry merchants are supporting nature or Indigenous peoples if he had been informed of the Cartier Foundation’s direct “hand in hand” relationship with the gold and diamond jewelry company Cartier.

Of course, the works of art by Jaider Esbell that Cartier purchased for their collection are among his more poetic; nature and spirits related paintings that do not directly confront the colonialism and capitalism that Cartier represents.

The Venice Biennal also featured Jaider Esbell’s nature and spirit related work through November 27, 2022.

Similar work by Jaider Esbell is now presented by Cartier through October 2023 at the Triennale de Milano in the exhibition titled “We are Forest”… This time Bruce Albert, anthropologist and consultant for Cartier, has the title of “Art Director.”

Jaider Esbell had hoped to organize an Indigenous art ecology in parallel to the institutions and galleries that developed from colonialism and capitalism because: « They want to flourish, fantasize and disguise, distort, soften our words. We are in this fight, a fight for life, for our territory. »

GOLD MINING KILLS! “Artivistas Indígenas“

Jaider Esbell (1979-2021)

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.

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