Nheë Nheë Nheë - 2018

 

The art installation Nheë Nheë Nheë materializes the trauma of colonization through a sharp visual metaphor, exposing the open wound of catechization and the subjugation of Indigenous peoples. Composed of thirteen olive branches transformed into handles for agricultural tools—such as shovels and digging irons—the work connects the imposition of faith to the transfiguration of Indigenous bodies into an exploitative labor force. The title itself ironically reclaims the colonialist onomatopoeia historically used to dismiss Indigenous languages as mere meaningless noise; however, in the Língua Geral (General Language), the term Nhe'ẽ carries the profound meaning of "to speak" or "speech." Thus, the installation operates as an echo of resistance: what the colonizer attempted to reduce to gibberish was, in truth, cosmology, identity, and voice.

The choice of the olive tree as a raw material carries a dense historical and religious weight, as the tree—a universal symbol of peace and anointing in monotheistic religions—directly evokes the crucial role of the religious orders that led the catechism missions. In the installation, this mystical element undergoes a violent mutation, ceasing to represent communion to become the very hilt of oppression, revealing how faith was instrumentalized to justify cultural massacre. By using these branches of sacred wood as handles for shovels and digging irons, the work illustrates the drastic rupture of the native way of life and its ancestral relationship with the land. The shovel evokes the forced domestication of nature and the exhaustion of the body subjected to someone else's profit, while the digging iron symbolizes the double death perpetrated by the colonial process—the physical death of those who collapsed from exhaustion, and the cultural death that buried sacred rituals, deities, and ancestral knowledge. Each of the thirteen tools functions as a monument to enforced silence, reminding us that the loss of language and the prohibition of sacred practices were the most cruel weapons of domination. By exposing the rigidity of wood molded for toil, Nheë Nheë Nheë refuses oblivion and summons the viewer to confront the root of our historical formation, built upon the forced silencing of entire cultures through the combined violence of iron and the cross.