Pinar Yolacan
Pinar Yolacans movie Tuire Kayapó (First Contact)
ISTANBUL'74 present the online premiere of ‘Tuire Kayapó’ (First Contact) by our artist Pınar Yolaçan, this Saturday, April 10 at 8 PM on their YouTube Channel.
The movie, ‘Tuire Kayapó’ (First Contact) is a moving portrait of the most important female chief of the Kayapó people, known for her environmental activism in the Brazilian Amazon since the late 1980s. The video discusses the issues of the Kayapó people, such as deforestation, expansion of the cities towards the Indigenous territories, demarcation, discrminination, national agricultural policies, public administration, corruption and infectious diseases as a reslut of allt this.
“Issues as such represent a metaphor to the current global problems that are not only peculiar to the Kayapo people but highly relevant in Turkey and elsewhere. Climate change and infectious diseases such as Covid-19 are direct results of deforestation and agricultural policies on the part of so-called first-world countries capitalizing on the resources of the rest of the world. Therefore, as humanity, we are suffering the consequences of these policies at this point and time in our civilization.”
—Pınar Yolaçan, April 2021
The screening will be followed by a live Q&A with Charlotte Jansen, Elephant Magazine Commissioning Editor, author of Girl on Girl: Art and Photography in the Age of the Female Gaze, and the artist on ISTANBUL’74’s Instagram account.
About Tuire Kayapó
Granddaughter of a family of former chiefs, Tuire Kayapó garnered global attention during the opposition of the construction of the Belo Monte Dam by Eletrobras and Eletronorte on Xingu river in Kayapó territory. During the meeting which took place in Altamira in 1989, numerous tribes attended to show solidarity against the building of the dam near their reserve with growing concerns of its environmental and social damage to the area. In one instance during the meeting, Tuire walked up to the head of the engineers with her machete and pressed it against his cheek in a symbolic gesture of resistance. This photograph of her became an iconic staple for the fight to defend Xingu river. Since then she has established herself as one of the prominent leaders of the Kayapó people and is known and respected for her dedication and work in the areas of environmental protection, demarcation of the Indigenous lands, education, and human rights.