Reforesting Imaginaries

Contra-Colonial Creative Ecologies

Abstract

This essay examines how the concept of “reforesting” (“reflorestar” Núñez 2021, Krenak 2022) frames the textual/visual/mediatic works by Gustavo Caboco Wapichana,. By foregrounding a phytographic (Vieira 2017) approach to stories/storytelling, these Indigenous artists and authors reforest thought and imagination, creating a fertile terrain from which to rethink and challenge (neo) colonialism and its attendant modes of extractivist monocultures, from the appropriation of “erva mate” by white settlers to the extraction and resistance of Phyto and Indigenous knowledges by and against colonial archives.

Via phytographic germinations, Caboco Wapichana’s creations present a multiplicity of expressivities, subjectivities, knowledges, and creative interventions that invite us to consider different chronologies, geographies, and modes of being and feeling rooted in and/or that converse with other than human existences, thereby effecting a contra-colonial gesture. By affecting this contra-colonial reforestation, these artistic endeavors also offer a way of thinking against the grain of anthropogenic environmental crisis.