Wateoma husipe / Larvas de oruga / Caterpillar larvae

2019 - Painting (Painting)
50 x 70 cm

Wateoma husipe / Larvas de oruga / Caterpillar larvae by Sheroanawe Hakihiiwe exemplify his most abstract work, where he choses particular elements of a living organism to create his renditions. During the process of depuration of forms he develops a series of translations whose inception is the daily life and culture of his community, deep in the Amazon rainforest. The works reveal structures rather than shapes, organization rather than form, exposing a way of seeing where nature and culture are not mutually exclusive but manifesting simultaneously.

Sheroanawe Hakihiiwe is a Yanomami artist who lives and works in Upper Orinoco, at the Venezuelan side of the Amazon rainforest. His work is part of a tradition of abstraction in art, not connected to Western genealogies, but to Amazonian cosmologies, and lately he has contributed to the acknowledgment of the contemporaneity and relevance of such traditions in Latin America. His drawings describe the shapes of animals and plants – or the marks they leave – which are part of the Yanomami territory. They mimic, to a certain extent, the vital rhythms of different organisms, instead of representing them. The protection of Yanomami knowledge and memory is a key motivation behind Hakihiiwe’s work. While in the Amazon, where he spends most of his time with no communication outside his territory, he keeps a notebook of sketches. He works on them, synthesizing the forms of plants and animals he records. He then spends periods of time in Caracas where he translates these drawings using different techniques.

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