Abstract
This artwork explores the entangled violence enacted upon both territory and the Indigenous body. By placing two shrunken heads over a colonial map of the Amazon region, the image collapses geographic conquest with physical dismemberment, revealing how imperial expansion operated through the simultaneous domination of land and life. The heads, once sacred ritual objects within Indigenous cosmologies, are shown here as artifacts, stripped of context, suspended over a state-imposed cartographic grid. At the same time, the presence of the heads refuses erasure; they interrupt the map’s authority, haunting its narrative of order with the memory of resistance and survival. Through this convergence of archive, ritual, and landscape, the artwork insists that the histories of territory are always also histories of the body.
Citation
Runcie, Walter O.. 1927. 'Cabezas reducidas [Shrunken Heads](Tsantsas) Walter O. Runcie Archive'. Dispossessions in the Americas. https://staging.dia.upenn.edu/en/art/APER092/
