Xingu Canopies / Estúdio Gustavo Utrabo

Context. The recent history of Brazil’s indigenous peoples and landscapes has been marked by violence. When the first European settlers arrived in 1500, what is now Brazil was inhabited by an estimated number of 11 million indigenous people in roughly 2,000 kindred settlements. After the first century of the invasion, 90% of that population had been wiped out, mainly by diseases such as flu, measles and smallpox, brought by the colonizers. In the following centuries, thousands more died in slavery. Today, Brazil’s indigenous cultures continue their daily struggle to stay alive and preserve their territories under to the current political and economic circumstances. Due to that, the project was settled, not only in a context of political struggle and resistance, but of a different way of relating with indigenous communities, since today’s villages and its inhabitants don’t match anymore with the old idyllic visions of modernity anymore. The architectural project proposes another way of seeing and relating to its landscape and territory, by supporting its concentric territorial configuration, establishing a distance, using local and industrial materials, revealing the passage of time and opening itself, by reclaiming a multipurpose support needed by the community. In response to the local context of this project, the first canopy for the Xingu Indigenous Park was built for the Kisêdjê Settlement, but other settlements will be able to embody its structure, which represents an important reclamation of the community’s rights and adaptation in an ever- changing culture.