Foram os peixes a inaugurar a linguagem (“The Fish Were the First to Inaugurate Language”) emerges from a hybrid origin that is both ancestral and scientific. Rooted in the riverine knowledge of the São Francisco River region in northern Minas Gerais, Brazil, the project draws on oral narratives passed down through generations—stories shaped by plants, fish, soil, and language itself.
The work is informed by long-term research in Ethnoecology, developed through academic study in Biology at the State University of Montes Claros (UNIMONTES) and fieldwork conducted in the Quilombo da Lapinha, a traditional Afro-Brazilian territory in northern Minas Gerais. This research examines species-exchange networks and collective management strategies as responses to climate change, grounding the project in lived ecological knowledge and community-based practices.
Running parallel to the scientific inquiry, poems, short stories, and essays emerged as an intuitive response to these environments, unfolding like floodplains attuned to change. The project proposes that science, art, and ancestry speak a shared language—fluid, relational, and embodied—much like rivers and the lives they sustain. In a context marked by climate crisis, environmental racism, and territorial conflict, Ethnoecology appears here as both an ancestral inheritance and a futurist necessity.
The project takes multiple forms: a book, a series of paintings, and a documentary. Created using simple, tactile materials—fabric paint, wooden panels, paper, ceramic vessels, cloth, and embroidery thread—the work evokes an amphibious and ambiguous sense of origin. It reflects a worldview in which bodies, landscapes, and language are inseparable: dust, river, and word; cells, leaves, temperature, animals, and humans—everything understood as movement, relation, and verb.
The project is part of the subtheme Symbiotic Futures – Ecopoetics in the Age of Extinction.
Author
Maria Emanuelle Guedes Cardoso
Maria Emanuelle Cardoso was born in Montes Claros, Minas Gerais, Brazil, on November 15, 2000. She holds a Bachelor’s degree in Biological Sciences from the State University of Montes Claros (Unimontes) and is currently pursuing a Master’s in Biodiversity and the Use of Natural Resources (PPGBURN) at the same institution. In addition to being a biologist, she is a poet and a popular educator. Her research focuses on Ethnoecology, with an emphasis on seed exchange networks and climate change. Her debut book, amarelo mostarda, was published in 2024 by Nauta Press and was a semifinalist in the Loba Prize. She has also published poems in more than 40 anthologies and journals in Portuguese, English, and Spanish. She received second place in the Poesia Agora Verão 2021 Prize (Trevo) and was selected for Clipe Poesia 2023 at Casa das Rosas. Her second book, foram os peixes a inaugurar a linguagem, is forthcoming.
