A cura das águas / Water healing
Monday, May 4th–Tuesday, May 13th, daily from 9:00–13:00 and 14:00–18:00
Location: VBKÖ, Maysedergasse 2/28, 1010 Vienna
Participants: 6 people per time slot (morning or afternoon)
Daily attendance is not required.
All materials, including paints, brushes, and canvas, will be provided.
The working language is Portuguese, with possibility to communicate in German and English.
Water Healing is a collective project to create a large-scale mural (12 meters wide) led by MAHKU, Huni Kuin artists’ collective recognized for its large-scale works. As part of the Wiener Festwochen Republic of Gods program, they invite artists, students, and anyone interested to participate in MAHKU’s collective creative process and to immerse themselves in the artistic and healing knowledge of Amazonian peoples.
MAHKU’s practice engages with traditional Huni Kuin music (Huni Meka chants), translating it collectively into a multimedia visual language. Led by spiritual leader and founder Ibã Sales Huni Kuin and artist-curator Kássia Borges, the collective process will be based on the concept of the reforesting of the mind. This is an Indigenous call addressed to the Western world: re-experiencing of dreams, relationships, past and future. Through MAHKU’s work, a holistic understanding of being unfolds, they explore the continuous revitalization of origin myths, the dissolution of linear time, and the deep connection between all beings in everyday life and in the spiritual world.
The creation process will take place at the Austrian Association of Women Artists (VBKÖ), who support the project organized by globalista in the frame of Wiener Festwochen. The painting will be in the Badeschiff, the festival headquarters, and in this way it symbolically will connect the VBKÖ and the Badeschiff with the spirit of the forest.
Kássia Borges Mytara
Kássia Borges is a Karajá artist, curator, professor, and activist whose work explores indigeneity, resistance, genealogy, and healing. Clay is her primary material, but she is also a member of the MAHKU collective, which translates traditional Huni Kuin chants into painting. She holds a Master’s in Fine Arts, a PhD in Environmental Sciences and Sustainable Development, and a degree in Political Philosophy.
Since the 1980s, she has challenged structural inequalities tied to her identities as an Indigenous woman and artist. Her work transforms traditional body painting into sculptural forms, reclaiming Indigenous presence and territory through art. A member of the Curandoras collective, she is committed to “healing through art” and to re-centering women within Indigenous cosmologies. Her work has been widely exhibited, and she currently serves as associate curator at the São Paulo Museum of Art (MASP).
Ibã Sales Huni Kuin
Ibã Sales Huni Kuin is an Indigenous researcher, cultural anthropologist, teacher, and spiritual leader of the Huni Kuin people. A master of traditional song (Txana), his work focuses on the preservation and transmission of Huni Kuin musical and ritual knowledge, especially through the spiritual practice of Nixi Pae. He is a lecturer and researcher at the Federal University of Acre and has been teaching within his community since 1983.
Combining anthropology, poetry, music, and visual art, Ibã translates ancestral knowledge into contemporary forms, particularly through large-scale paintings developed with his students and the MAHKU collective. His work, which includes films, recordings, and international exhibitions, is dedicated to safeguarding cultural memory and revitalizing Indigenous knowledge systems that were nearly lost during the era of rubber exploitation.