This exhibition features the work of a leading generation of Amazonian indigenous artists working today. Rember Yahuarcani, Brus Rubio and Harry Pinedo/Inin Metsa explore the practices of place-making and the claims of belonging of Amazonian indigenous people. Through their work, they highlight issues of spatial politics and ecological connections, migration, cosmopolitanism and their current dwelling conditions as they challenge static and narrow views of indigenous art.
Rember Yahuarcani explores the mythology of his people, the Uitoto, showing how place-making is embedded into a network of relations with other worlds and beings. His work questions Western notions of place, while alerting us to the destruction of these worlds through capitalist mining and extractivism. Brus Rubio from the Bora and Uitoto groups reflects upon his intercultural biography and transnational mobility as an artist. His work imagines a future of true intercultural cities as part of a cosmopolitan world in which indigenous people and their knowledge participate in equal ways. Finally, Harry Pinedo/Inin Metsa from the Shipibo people, highlights the process of migration and the battles in making urban indigenous communities – raising questions of government responsibility, housing rights and the provision of basic services with a focus on the current pandemic.
Place-making, World-making is guest-curated by Dr Giuliana Borea, as part of her Marie Curie Fellowship with the Department of Sociology, University of Essex, working in collaboration with the Centre of Latin American and Caribbean Studies and the Centre of Migration Studies at Essex.
We are grateful for the support of the Peruvian Embassy in London.
