Postado em 21/10/2024 - 5:40
OCHER: THE WORLD’S ORIGIN
The first era of Technological Reproducibility can be traced to evidence of the protagonism of women in rock art and indigenous body painting
Ocre - A Origem da Reprodutibilidade da Imagem (2017), performance ritual de Anita Ekman na Toca Pinga do Boi, Parque Nacional da Serra da Capivara
“THE PAST IS A DREAM THAT ONLY EXISTS IN THE PRESENT BECAUSE OF THE TRACES IT LEAVES” (Barbara Glowczewski, Totemic Becomings: Cosmopolitics of the Dreaming)
In an empty shell’s spiral, the sea appears to whisper its immeasurable time’s echo. Time goes by, but feelings seem to be continually pulsing waves. The world seems to be its uninterrupted surf. In the ocean, giant tortoises swim across the waters as millennia cross time, in the swing of waves that come and go.
Life on Earth came from the ocean. However, who can assure that the depths of this endless sea are as a woman’s soul? Who could measure its exact depth?
Attabey, or Attabeira, was one of the names given to the Mother of Waters (Mãe das Águas); a deity related to the moon, the tides and the menstruation; she is the mother of all life for the Taínos indigenous peoples. Originating from the mythical cave Cacibajagua, Taínos are inhabitants of the island we call today Hispaniola (Dominican Republic and Haiti) and they were the first indigenous people to (as they say) discover Christopher Columbus, in October 1492. ‘’The people we call Taínos today discovered Christopher Columbus and the Spaniards. It was not Christopher Columbus who discovered us because we were at home and they were lost at sea, when they landed in our beaches’’, explains leader Jorge Baracutei Estevez (from Higuayagua, a taina organization for the New York and the Caribbean area), during an interview to National Geographic, in 2019.
Bantu-speaking Africans call the sea Kalunga. Kalunga is the separation between nothingness and all existence, a continuous generating force, the principle of all changes on Earth. Kalunga is a body of water, the place where ancestor live, a cemetery. Tiganá Santana, in his PhD thesis (The Bantu-Kongo Cosmology by Bunseki Fu-Kiau: Black Translation, Reflections and Dialogues from Brazil), quotes the Congolese thinker Kimbwandende Kia Bunseki FuKiau:
‘’The World (Nza) has become a tangible reality floating in Kalunga. (…) Also meaning ocean, Kalunga, is a gateway and a wall between two worlds. Kalunga became the idea of immensity as well (sense le/wayawa) that cannot be measured; an output and an input, the source and the origin of life’’ (Kindoki or Solution Attendue, 1970).
THE STAIN OF LIFE
In the Western view, the origin of life took place in a primitive ocean, when approximately 3.770 billion and possibly 4,280 billion years ago, microorganisms started to produce oxygen in hydrothermal springs. Oxygen, as released during the photosynthesis process by micro-organisms (as cyanobacteria or blue algae) interacted with iron (originated from rocks found dissolved in seawater), resulting on a red mineral landing on the seabed: hematite (bloodstone), or iron oxide (Fe2O3), as known as ocher.
Found in the Green Rocks Belt Nuvvuagittuq, in Quebec, Canada, the discovery of microfossils that contained filaments of hematite proved, according to the science philosopher David Turnbull, that, “geologically, ocher is the stain of life, the indicator of birth of all organisms on Earth.” Red ocher is the first pigment that mankind made use of for painting its own body, its caves and its rock shelters. Ocher is the blood that gave art its life. And it was used on all the continents of the globe, except Antarctica. When referring to this common element in menstruation, childbirth and abortion, the blood stone was understood by several different human groups as a symbol of birth, life and death.
In Australia, for the Aborigines in Flinders, ocher is related to their ancestors sacred blood, as “a symbol of spiritual renewal and ritualistic cleansing, an agent of transcendence, from illness to health, from death to renewal, from dirt to ritualistic cleanliness, from the secular to the sacred, from the present reality to Dreaming”, as states the anthropologist Philip Jones.
The anthropologist and curator Sandra Benites (Guarani Nhandeva, a friend and partner in several pieces and curatorial projects) defines Earth as a living body: “It is the body of a woman, Nhandecy Eté, our first mother. As we walk on Earth, we are treading on a woman’s body”. Therefore, the caves area act as Nhandecy Eté’s womb, and her ocher blood brings us closer to humanity’s origins. As Jones points out, “the ocher red played a key role in the philosophical development of humanity, (…) a thread that runs through more than 500,000 years of human history”. This yarn is intrinsically linked to the work and the creativity of women who have played a crucial role in forming human imagination and the development of technologies for connection and collaboration – resulting, among other things, in the possibility of humans to navigate, to launch ourselves overseas.
Through the history of ocher, it is possible to expand the comprehension of different meanings of our presence on Earth, to reimagine and recreate, in the present time, another origin of the future.
COULD WOMEN HAVE BEEN THE FIRST ARTISTS?
On the island of Java, Indonesia, a shell was discovered on which zigzag designs apparently made with a shark’s tooth (dated to 400,000 years Before the Present) are the oldest evidence found so far that our human ancestors (Homo erectus) produced art.
Made with red ocher on a rock fragment dated to 73,000 years before the Present, a zigzag design is also the first evidence found until this moment of our own species (Homo sapiens) creating art. Those drawings were found in what we could consider as a studio for the first modern humans: the beautiful Blombos Cave, located facing the Indian Ocean, in South Africa. In this same cave, seashells dated to 100,000 years A.P. were discovered, which were used as reeds for mixing ocher (in addition to red, it can also be yellow or white in color), and that have already played a key role in what women maintain as an essential rite of beauty up to today: the body painting.
At the opposite extreme end of the African continent, in Morocco, archaeologists have found red ocher painted shells that were perforated to make a necklace (dated to 82,500 years A.P.), which would constitute proof that by then the rope production technology had already been invented. According to archeologist Elizabeth Barber, in her book Women ’s Work (1994), the invention of the rope was the revolution that allowed human beings to move on to all continents, as having rope made it possible to capture, to retain, to join, to carry, to create fishing gear, as well as to weave sails to cross the sea.
On this side, across the Atlantic, in a vast territory (in islands, in the estuaries of large rivers and from North to South on the Brazilian coast) mountains of shells called Sambaquis (some would reach up to 30 meters high) were raised for longer than 7 millennia to bury ocher painted human bones. The way death was dealt with has transformed the Atlantic landscape.
Approximately 65,000 years ago on the North Atlantic, on the European continent, our Neanderthal ancestors had already painted abstract figures with red ocher, leaving marks (in negative) of their hands inside the cave from La Pasiega, on Monte El Castillo, in Cantabria, Spain.
Started by the Neanderthals, Homo Sapiens continued this tradition in the caves of that same mount when they started, from 40 thousand years A.P. to paint dozens of animal figures next to the abstract symbols, leaving more handprints.
These images (in negative), also present in other Paleolithic caves in Europe, besides proving the crucial importance of the ritualistic performance of body painting with ocher in the origins of art, made possible to the archaeologist Dean Snow of the Pennsylvania Institute of Technology, to claim that 73% of the hands corresponded to hands of cis women – he studied 32 archaeological sites in the cave cluster at Monte El Castillo and, in France, the caves of Azar Merle and Gargas, raising an important question: would women have been the artists in the origins of art?
I made a series of ritualistic performances for the Project Ocher at the Caves of Monte El Castillo, in defense of the fundamental importance to recognize the role of women as artists, that is, to assume that women (cis or trans) were and are protagonists and creators of the human imaginary as much as men.
