Where digital interfaces flicker like ancestral bonfires, Zahy Tentehar rewrites colonial protocols in the Tenetehara language. A Guajajara artist-programmer, she does not “translate” cultures—she dismantles the syntax of power. Her work functions as an epistemological antivirus, infecting the operating system of contemporary art with forest commands—lines of code that disable cultural firewalls and restore original files erased by colonial formatting.
Born in the village of Colônia, a territory under perpetual siege, Zahy migrated to Rio de Janeiro not as a migrant subject but as an agent of historical decompression. Her body became a biotechnological interface: She mapped scars of failed land demarcations into 3D patterns, converted healing chants into facial recognition algorithms, and transformed the Cana Brava Reserve into an alternative data server. “There is no conflict between chips and vines,” she declares, wearing bracelets that blend tucum fibers with printed circuits—semiotic guerrilla wearables.
In “Karaiw a’e wà”, the artist does not question the notion of civilization—she dismantles its hardware. Using shamanic deepfakes, she replaced the faces of colonial pioneers in academic paintings with portraits of Guajajara elders, forcing institutions to host this critical update. The result? A gallery of shattered mirrors where the “civilized” see themselves naked, stripped of the layers of violence that clothe them. The work does not dialogue with art history—it hijacks its database.
Her “Aiku’è zepé” project at MASP operated as a cultural organ transplant: she introduced an Indigenous knowledge circulatory system into the concrete building. Visitors were guided not by audio guides but by decoded noise—recordings from community radios in the Araribóia Indigenous Territory interlaced with electromagnetic waves from surveillance satellites. Linear curation led to rhizomatic navigation, where each room corresponded to a Guajajara lunar cycle.
The occupation of Aldeia Maracanã emerges in her practice as a de-urbanization laboratory. Zahy did not “occupy” the space—she reprogrammed its geography through choreographies that transformed sidewalks into virtual crop fields, using mapped projections to resynchronize the city’s heartbeat with the rhythm of maracá shakers. In this process, asphalt became fertile ground for phantom architecture—invisible structures of traditional knowledge defying the materiality of concrete.
In her reinterpretation of “Macunaíma”, the artist does not adapt the text—she performs critical autopsy. Her cinematic scalpel exposes the Eurocentric metastases within the body of Brazilian modernism. Each scene is a cleansing protocol: where the original fetishizes the “savage,” she injects narrative antibodies crafted from Tentehara myths. Andrade’s hero becomes an empty avatar, hacked by ancestral intelligences that dismantle his “Brazilianness” like a colonial Lego piece.
“Pytuhem” reimagines documentary as forensic ritual. Drones do not “film” Araribóia—they perform spectral scans, revealing overlapping layers of time: current fires over centuries-old massacre scars, trails of isolated Awá-Guajá crossing ranchers’ maps. Raw data is processed by software applying Guajajara cosmovision filters: deforestation numbers morph into basket-weaving patterns, GPS coordinates translate into orientation chants.
Zahy Tentehar does not make political art—she engineers escape ecosystems. Her installations are relay stations for endangered knowledge, her cinema is decompression software for imprisoned realities. While the art world debates inclusion, she has already migrated to the next layer—developing virtual reality that does not simulate worlds but unwraps dimensions buried under colonialism. Her legacy? Proving technological resistance isn’t about tools but recompiling worlds in languages colonial firewalls don’t recognize as threats.