IMS presents Paiter Suruí, Gente de Verdade: a living archive in movement

What if the most powerful portrait of the contemporary came not from a runway, but from a village? The exhibition Paiter Suruí, Gente de Verdade, by Coletivo Lakapoy, turns the image into weapon and affection, in a radical gesture of authorship: Indigenous people telling their own histories with their own cameras.

Bringing together more than 800 images produced since the 1970s, when the first cameras reached the Sete de Setembro Indigenous Land, the exhibition breaks the exotic fetish and returns to the images their noblest function: to bear witness. There is no extractive white gaze here; there is living memory, shared across generations, weaves of affection, pain and struggle stitched onto photographic paper and pixels.

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That initiative not only challenges the limits between archive and museum, it also gives new meaning to the very idea of fashion and image: what is style if not a way of inhabiting the world with dignity? The headdress and the ceremonial staff, the T-shirt and the mobile phone, everything here is a symbol of resistance and reinvention. As Boltanski and Broodthaers already suggested, the archive is also a field of symbolic battle. And in the case of Coletivo Lakapoy, it is also a gesture of healing and diplomacy. The Brazil that wants a future has to pass through this unfiltered memory, where fashion, culture and politics intertwine.

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Paiter Suruí, Gente de Verdade.

A project of Coletivo Lakapoy

26/7 to 2/11/2025

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IMS Paulista

Avenida Paulista, 2424,

São Paulo/SP - Brazil

Free entry.

Tuesday to Sunday and public holidays, 10am to 8pm (closed Mondays).

Last admission: 30 minutes before closing. 

Rated suitable for all ages

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