Sueños de Jepira (Dreams of Jepira)
2022 - Film & Video (Film & Video)
10:30 minutes
Eusebio Siosi
Jepira is a mythical and essential place of the spiritual dimension for the Wayuu people. It is the starting point and final resting place in their transcendence process which is part of the territory and not dissociated from it, such as in the Catholic notion of Heaven. Today, the Pilon de Azúcar hill which corresponds with Jepira is part of their reclaimed land and connects this dessert culture to the sea; it is the place the Wayuu go when they need to speak with the dead which, along with dreams, is the main way to access spiritual knowledge. In a ritualistic performative action titled Sueños de Jepira (Dreams of Jepira) artist Eusebio Siosi roams through and hikes up to the Pilón de Azúcar hill in Cabo de La Vela, Guajira. There, he blends with his territory through his bare feet, and establishes a spiritual dialogue with his great-grandmother, a spiritual leader whom he did not meet but who, being in Jepira, is available to her people for consultation. Heir to the spiritual tradition of the Wayuu (usually reserved for women), Siosi begins his journey instigated by a desire to become one with this territory and connect with his ancestors, the sound of the ever-present winds accompanying his walk. In his ascension to the top of the hill, moments of ritual, protection, and cleansing of the body succeed in the pilgrimage. Atop the Pilón de Azúcar, Siosi encounters a foreign element, a niche housing the Fatima Virgin which was forcefully installed on the hill in the twentieth century. Siosi surrounds and covers it with a sacred cloth and makes it disappear in a reckoning of cultures: imposition, domination, but also liberation. The Catholic symbol thus becomes invisible to the territory and the dream of a Jepira that belongs again to the Wayuu is fulfilled.
Eusebio Siosi is an artist from the Wayuu people in the Guajira Peninsula in Northern Colombia. He trained as an architect and is today one of the most active cultural leaders in his territory which, along with his own practice, has helped localize the Wayyu’s contemporary artistic production. Through photography and video, and with the use of ritual elements, objects, and materials, his work focuses on the intersection of spiritual practices and the Wayuu territory. Siosi carries out ritualistic performances in which the combination of objects, gestures, and locations propose a displacement or relocation of the Wayuu culture in the world. From an organically decolonial perspective, he speaks of his people and of the recuperation of land and cultural rights. Siosi’s actions and performances open up spaces of communication between this community and the West, both incisive as well as healing, that point at a new order and relation between peoples. His performances operate as interfaces that the viewer can observe, consider, and sometimes participate in order to reassess notions of displacement, otherness, and colonialism through a highly ceremonial experience that is intrinsically associated with the territory.
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