Quando o Manto fala e o que o Manto diz: Museum Encounters and Reclaiming the Sacred in the Work of Glicéria Tupinambá

In September 2024, a sacred object over 300-years removed from Brazil’s Tupinambá indigenous community returned to terra brasileira. A cloak of bright-red feathers, tied with intricate knots and sealed with the wax of local bees, the manto Tupinambá holds deep sacred and ritual importance for Tupinambá people, their activation central to communicating with more-than-human powers. Yet, until 2024, all existing cloaks were held exclusively in museums outside of Brazil. Offered as gifts under duress or simply taken from during the colonial era, the majority of the intact mantos are held in the colonial collections in European museums. Until recently, the practice of constructing these sacred cloaks—a process which requires the use of specific materials, techniques, and knowledge—was lost.

Artist Glicéria Tupinambá has been central to efforts to revive cloak construction, recommence ritual activation, and repatriate these sacred objects now held far from Tupinambá land. This paper tells the story of Glicéria’s multiple museum encounters with mantos Tupinambás: her initial visit to European museums to study colonial-era cloaks, her revival of cloak weaving based on those museum encounters with sacred objects and forces, her decision (in conversation with more-than human powers) to construct new cloaks for museum display, and her merging of art and activism through video-art installations. Ultimately theorizing secular aesthetics of museums in Brazil, this paper teases out Glicéria’s striking investment in museums, her work within and against the confines of museum institutions, and the persistent museological management of sacred Tupinambá objects. 

This paper places Glicéria’s work in the context of an earlier Tupinambá museum encounter with the cloak. In 2000, Tupinambá elder Dona Nivalda traveled to São Paulo’s Ibirapuera Park and came into contact with a cloak on loan from the National Museum of Denmark, exhibited as part of a monumental show marking the quintennial anniversary of Cabral’s arrival in Brazil. In a subsection of the exhibit titled “Indigenous Arts,” Nivalda encountered the cloak taken from her ancestors during the 17th century Dutch occupation. Knowing its significance, she attempted unsuccessfully to prevent its return to Denmark. Understanding this longer history, this paper analyzes the cultural productions of another Tupinambá woman a decade and a half later and her fusion of indigenous craft, contemporary art, majé epistemologies, and spirited activism. 

Unlike Nivalda, Glicéria draws on museum practices and technologies to access and preserve Tupinambá sacred objects and practices. While my larger work examines Gliceria’s approach as a curator and her use of photography in documenting her process, this paper focuses squarely on the film Quando o Manto fala e o que o Manto diz (trans. When the cloak talks and what the cloak says) which Brazil’s premier contemporary art museum MASP (São Paulo Museum of Art) exhibited in its video room in 2023. Particularly, I examine her use of video art to construct arguments about sacrality, ritual, and cosmology in tandem with political claims about the repatriation of the cloak, placing them in the context of MASP’s larger attempts to re-narrate the history of art in Brazil. 

Understanding the history of the manto Tupinambá in relation to Glicéria Tupinambás work dramatizes the museum as a site of both disciplinary power and activism. Because museums control sacred objects in this story, they become the setting that contains and scripts intimate sacred encounters. Glicéria was only able to regain her community’s sacred embodied knowledge of cloak construction through visiting a museum in France. There she studied the preserved cloak’s knots, the specific feathers used, and also experienced a sacred encounter with the gods. The cloak spoke to her. 

Given museum institutions’ extensive management and exclusion of the Tupinambá sacred, Glicéria’s decision to invest even further in museums is striking. Museum engagement has been central her efforts to reclaim the manto Tupinambá. In addition to political activations around museums, she has created artworks, photographs, and films geared toward museum exhibition and has achieved success as an artist and curator. She has even revived the practice of cloak weaving and displayed the cloaks she has woven in museum exhibits. In her account, she first had to ask the gods for permission to display these objects in the museum: a request granted on the condition that she also make cloaks for exclusive use in the community. 

This paper narrates the story of Glicéria’s museum encounters and engagement as one, ultimately, of museum management of sacred objects. Following Marisol de la Cadena’s work, the paper narrates the willing participation of an indigenous artist in museological display, complicating flattened narratives of exclusion or accounts of control that sanitize participation in the museological project. I build on the insights of scholars in Brazilian studies Roger Sansi, John Collins, and Christen Smith, particularly their accounts of the soft violence of inclusion under the rubric of culture. Putting these works into conversation with work in secularism studies by Vincent Lloyd and Brent J. Crosson, I show how contemporary art museums are invested in defining, managing, and excluding forms of the sacred, and in doing so construct what I refer to as a secular aesthetic. Glicéria’s museum engagements show not only how secular aesthetics are engaged in projects of defining the nation-state and re-narrating history, as Lloyd and Crosson suggest, but also, building on Lucia Hulsether’s work, of absorbing and performing critique. Exhibitions become opportunities for the museum to let sacred objects live, aligning the museum with the underside of history, refashioning it as an mechanism of liberation not containment, solidarity not control. 

While Glicéria and others’ efforts to return the manto have achieved some success, the managing control of the museum remains regnant—a fact recently noted by indigenous leaders outside of the Museu Nacional in Rio upon the manto’s return. The manto repatriated by the National Museum of Denmark was put under the care of Brazil’s National Museum in Rio—a museum with an mixed record of preservation. Indigenous leaders’ demand that the manto be allowed a different life suggests the deep roots of colonialism in many museums’ secular aesthetic programs—an unrelenting, transcontinental disciplining and control of sacred objects.