This probe proposes a brief historical contextualization of the importance of the millennial Indigenous practice of featherwork, which was and still is a common presence in a great many Indigenous cultures from the Abya Yala Indigenous territory, the so-called Americas. Here, the "assojabas", which are important ceremonial mantles made by the Tupinambá people, are analyzed as the matrix of the sensory featherwork discussion. By engaging with a plethora of theoretical contributions by authors from the fields of Latin American featherwork studies and sensory studies, I expand on how the Tupinambá objectual ancestors are embedded in Indigenous multi-sensory ceremonies and how the encounter with European colonial missions and Christian values intervened in their sensory implications. Moving towards the contemporary period, I narrate some of the current challenges faced by the descendants of the ancient Tupinambá people, the Tupinambá of Olivença, to preserve their legacies and material culture in dialogue with museological institutions in Brazil and Europe. As I situate the dilemmas and possibilities of proposing a decolonial channel within art institutions, concerning the continuous material implications and agency of Indigenous objects, the notion of the contemporary museums as important cultural places of negotiation between plural sensory systems unfolds. 

The full probe can be downloaded as a PDF here.

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