A territory overflowing with vitality likewise animates its images. The experiences of artists who create in the Peruvian and Colombian Amazon, or in territories near its margins, require us to reconfigure notions of the very functions of the representative: What role do artworks play in environments with multiple agencies, in which each entity—animal, vegetable, mineral—seems to be supplied with a particular perspective? In a territory in which the presence of the Western world, with a logic that includes visual codes of its own, is a constant threat to frequently ancient ways of life? In the political battles of the Amazon, what is the role played by the experiences of artists? How can their images be revindicated as new, active agents?
(Lima, Peru, 1987)
An artist, educator and illustrator, Venuca Evanan is the heir to the artistic expressions of the Sarhua community of Ayacucho, Peru. A specialist in traditional paintings with earth tones and bird feathers, she has over twenty years of experience painting Sarhua tables and experimenting with a variety of media, such as murals, wood, textiles, sculpture, etc. The varied themes addressed in her work include the traditions of the Sarhua people, migration, eroticism, feminism, the valorization of Sarhua women in society and their active role in contemporary visual arts. In recent years, she has been devoted to promoting and passing on traditional Sarhua knowledge through workshops and exhibitions at public and private institutions in Peru and abroad. She has been a finalist and a winner at many domestic and international contemporary art competitions.
The Role of Women in the Sarhua Tables
The daughter of Primitivo Evanán and Valeriana Vivanco, pioneers in promoting the Sarhua tables, Venuca Evanán is an autodidactic artist. She draws and paints on a variety of surfaces, everyday objects in women’s lives. Her art is captured in the Tables of Sarhua, an Ayacuchan artform declared to be part of Peru’s National Cultural Heritage in 2018. This artform was generally the work of the men of the community, but the migration processes that began in the seventies brought it to Lima, where it was learned and practiced by the sons and daughters of Sarhuas living in the capital. Venuca learned this art alongside her parents and has therefore been considered to be one of the first women to break with patriarchal systems for creating Sarhua tables. She also changed the themes of the tables, incorporating eroticism, LGBT identities, feminist protest and themes of everyday life, centering the agency of migrant women, etc. As part of her interest in promoting Sarhua art, Venuca currently organizes workshops in which she teaches participants how to create Tables of Sarhua in Peru and abroad. Her designs have been finalists and winners at many domestic and international contemporary art competitions.
(Loreto, Peru, 1960)
Born in Pucaurquillo, a town in the Peruvian Amazon, Santiago Yahuarcani is an autodidactic painter and sculptor, a leader of the Uitoto and Bora peoples of the Ampiyacú River. He is descended from survivors of the Rubber Genocide that was committed in the Amazon in the early twentieth century. He has dedicated his life to developing art and narration as forms of expression. His most important exhibitions have included Aimen+ at the Museo Amazónico in Iquitos (2010); El clan de la Garza Blanca at the Centro Cultural El Olivar in San Isidro, Lima, (2018); and El lugar de los espíritus at the Peruvian-North American Cultural Institute (IPNA) in Iquitos (2019), in conjunction with the artist Nereyda López.
Belonging to the White Crane Clan of the Uitoto nation, Rember Yahuarcani is a visual artist, writer, curator and activist for the rights and cosmovision of the peoples of the Amazon. Since 2003, he has individually and collectively shown his work in galleries and art museums in Latin and North America, Europe and Asia. His most recent individual and collective exhibitions were held at the Beijing Cervantes Institute and the 8th International Beijing Art Biennial, respectively. His articles have been published in academic journals and newspapers such as El Comercio. He has won the Carlota Carvallo de Nuñez National Children’s Literature Award and he is the winner of the Ninth National Painting Competition of the Central Reserve Bank of Peru and of the Second Intercontinental Indigenous Art Biennial. He is the author of Buinaima’s Dream, Fidoma and the Forest of Stars, Birds and Their Colors and Summer and the Rain.
Contemporary Indigenous Art
For Indigenous people, the territory is much more than a physical or geographical site. It is, above all, an immaterial, magical and spiritual world, an invisible space in which different struggles play out, marking resistance and constructing proposals for the future. In that space, for example, the healer and the witch struggle against each other, one to heal and the other to do harm, but Indigenous people also struggle against other forces that threaten their cultural continuity and existence. Forces such as the state and its laws that are ignorant of the ancestral rights of Amazonian communities, or extractivist companies that threaten ecosystems, or those who exploit the resources of the jungle, such as drug traffickers or the timber mafia. This symbolic territory of myth and resistance is where contemporary Indigenous art moves, an art that distances itself from traditional Amazonian art—though they share an origin and a geographical space, it has its own particularities, aesthetics and objectives. Contemporary Indigenous art is nourished by the knowledge of our ancestors, in dialogue with the present time, seeking to generate concepts and spark questions.
A contemporary artist, mambeologist and researcher from the Muruymuina heartland in La Chorrera, Amazonas, Aimema Uai is a member of the White Crane (Eimen+) Clan. Her paintings are born from the ceremonies of her grandparents that took place in the mambeadero, where the counsel of the ancestors can be heard through a connection with sacred plants. She expresses this connection with her ancestral roots in each of her works: “Mambear before touching something” means to ask permission so that things go well, it is in this process through which she seeks the colors, symbols and visions she captures in her unique artworks. In 2003, she graduated from a Christian boarding school, where she learned Spanish as a second language, as well as other disciplines of Western education. She currently leads the Kanasto de Abundancia project together with Leo Fiagama (Ey+ago).
THE RESISTANCE OF ANANEKO OVER TIME: PAINTING THROUGH MAMBEADERO
The house of life (Ananeko) contains the strength needed to care for the world. Its four pillars are the forces for directing man’s thoughts, it is where the most important ceremonies and rituals are performed and it is the place of mambeadero. Mambeando, dialogues are written and woven that are shared and then put into practice, in the presence of mother Koka alongside Tabaco, medicines that help us to find balance and stay true to our roots. Although many peoples have been subjected to cultural and spiritual extermination, the spirit of the mother Koka is kept alive alongside those who care for her, providing knowledge for learning and unlearning. Painting through mambeadero means acknowledging our origins, knowing who we are and where we come from, it means caring for the word, keeping our mother tongue alive, questioning ourselves and embracing our identity. Mambeadero is the basis of our education and knowledge, but mental colonization has distanced ourselves from this source. It is time to direct our thought toward the house of life, to rethink, reflect and reposition our way of seeing the four directions. Reconnecting with Ananeko through the arts means reconciling ourselves with it through thought and opening up paths to recovering what we have left behind.