Jonathas de Andrade

In the seminal book “The Geography of Hunger” (1946), geographer, nutritionist, and hunger activist Josué de Castro publishes a critical research of the nutritional and political factors that perpetuate hunger in Brazil.

In “Fome de Resistência” Jonathas de Andrade uses historical and obsolete maps from the Brazilian Army and the Sudene (Superintendência de Desenvolvimento do Nordeste) [Superintendency for the Development of the Northeast] to expand on de Castro’s work and chart other forms of hunger. 

This project takes place in collaboration with Kayapó women from the Pukany indigenous community, who inhabit the Menkragnoti territory in southern Pará, in the Brazilian Amazon.

Taking to the village a set of maps that compose together the drawing of the demarcated Kayapó Mekragnoti territory, the women of the village were invited to intervene on the maps with the ancestral graphics of their people, which are daily applied on their bodies in ritualistic or ordinary situations.

The traditional graphics made by the hands of Kayapó women ignore and exceed the boundaries, making visible the contested nature of this territory, where a growing number of attacks sparked by recent government policies undermine the safety and existence of these ancestral lands.

As a caption of these maps, the photographs of the hands of each of the painters show the women who did the work; the images of the hands bring together a collective gesture of resistance.

At the same time that it presents individually, the absence of the face of each one puts the individual in perspective of the collective, emphasizing how much of a group ancestry there is in those paintings and how much their authorship is understood not as individual, but as collective.

This work starts the “Endless Hunger Map” series, casting glances on possible other symbolical hungers in Brazil; it was carried out with the support of Instituto Kabu and Marcelo Rosenbaum, with photographs by Cléber Oliveira (photos of the painters' hands).