Against the Museum Glass: Why Indigenous Culture Defies Patrimonialism
For Ailton Krenak and a new generation of Indigenous artists, culture is not an object to preserve but a living force in constant motion.
On a humid afternoon in São Paulo, visitors file into Itaú Cultural’s newest exhibition: Men am-ním Ailton Krenak. The space is less a retrospective than an echo chamber, filled with sketches, ink drawings, photographs of ancestors, fragments of notebooks, even the scent of annatto. But the presence that permeates the rooms is not the static aura of heritage. It is the vibration of a man who has never stopped insisting that culture must remain in motion.
Ailton Krenak is seventy-two years old, a philosopher, writer, and Indigenous leader from the Krenak people of Minas Gerais. He entered Brazil’s national consciousness during the Constituent Assembly of 1987, when he painted his face black with genipap dye while speaking in defense of Indigenous rights. That performance cracked the parliamentary façade: it was as if a river had forced its way into the marble hall. Ever since, Krenak has unsettled the categories in which Brazil—and much of the Western world—tries to store Indigenous life.
Against the Museum Glass
The central idea he returns to, again and again, is deceptively simple: Indigenous culture does not fit into patrimonialist thinking. For the Brazilian elite, “heritage” is an object to be catalogued, a house to be preserved, a monument to be safeguarded. For Indigenous peoples, culture is not permanent. It moves, transforms, is consumed and remade. A headdress does not belong to a future museum; it belongs to a festival, and when the festival is over, it may be taken apart, exchanged, recycled. A house is built for a season and abandoned when the river shifts. Meaning comes not from permanence, but from circulation.
This refusal is not a quaint anthropological trait. It is resistance. To insist that culture must be preserved in vitrines is to repeat the colonial logic that turned living peoples into dioramas. To insist that culture is alive, malleable, and ephemeral is to reject that logic altogether.
The Artists Who Detonate the Capsule
A new generation of Indigenous artists embodies this defiance. Daiara Tukano, Denilson Baniwa, Naine Terena, Glicéria Tupinambá, Arissana Pataxó, Gustavo Caboco—artists who paint, film, compose, and perform not as “native informants” but as protagonists in the global art circuit. They are not preserving traditions for outsiders; they are detonating the capsule that sought to contain them. When a Guarani orchestra takes the stage of São Paulo’s Municipal Theater, it is not to folklorize an opera—it is to recompose the very meaning of Brazilian modernity.
The same principle extends to identity itself. Across Brazil, tens of thousands who were once written off by census categories as “mixed” are reclaiming Indigenous belonging: Tupinambá, Potiguara, Cariri, Pankararu, Xukuru. Self-declaration, once dismissed as illegitimate, has become a political weapon. To declare oneself Indigenous is to refuse erasure, to rewrite genealogy, to announce that colonial archives do not define who counts as a people.
Beyond Heritage, Toward Relation
What does heritage mean, then, if permanence is denied? For Krenak, it is less a matter of objects than of gestures. The sketches he donates to friends, the notebooks scattered across decades, the speeches that reverberate long after they are delivered—these are not commodities. They are living relations. Culture is not what remains after people are gone. It is what keeps people in motion.
The temptation of institutions, whether museums or governments, is always to fix, to freeze, to select. But Indigenous thought insists on something riskier: that we allow culture to remain alive, unpredictable, uncontained. “You are not for sale,” Krenak reminds us, echoing words once attributed to Chief Seattle. The line is not slogan but ethic.
In an age when capitalism thrives by turning memory into merchandise—be it fashion appropriations, tourist festivals, or algorithmic archives—Krenak’s insistence feels radical. He offers no comfort to the curators of permanence. Instead, he demands that we live with the volatility of culture, not behind the glass of heritage but in the open air of transformation.
