“When we truly want to know things we people of the forest try to see them in dream. This is our way of studying.”

Davi Kopenawa

 

Joseca, a Yanomami artist, was born in 1971 in a community on the Lobo d’Almada River (Uxi u), a tributary of the upper Catrimani River in Roraima, still far from any contact with white people. He is the son of a “great man” (pata thë) and renowned shaman of the region, who passed away when he was a teenager. He currently lives and works in the village of Buriti, near Serra do Vento (Watoriki), on the left bank of the upper Demini River, in the northeastern region of the Amazonas state.

Joseca’s drawings and paintings feature, in thorough detail and vibrant colors, some of the entities, places, and episodes evoked by the chants of the great shamans of his community, which he has been accustomed to listening to very attentively since his childhood. As he describes:

I don’t draw without a reason. I take inspiration in the words I hear from the shamans, those who have the most beautiful chants, those who really know how to make the words of the xapiri pë spirits be heard. When they hold their sessions, I listen to their chants and record all these words in my mind, which I later dream about and transform into drawings.

Through their choreography and chants, the Yanomami shamans “bring down” and “make dance” the images (utupë) of beings and places from original time. Joseca, on his turn, produces his own images by transposing onto paper or canvas the dreams inspired by the scenes evoked in the dark of the night by these shamanic chants. His dreams are thus gradually transformed one after the other into “image skins” (utupa siki) that give us access to the saga of the ancestors of the “beginning of time” Yanomami. During their sessions, the shamans share with the inhabitants of their house the vision of the universes they travel through during their incessant cosmological odysseys. In a similar gesture, Joseca brings forth for us his own dreamed images of the multiple more-than-human universes that make up the Yanomami “land-forest-world,” urihi a. The works presented in this exhibition are, in this sense, dreamlike “screenshots,” stills from the metaphysical film that unfolds through the ancestral narrative of Yanomami shamanic chants.

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For the Yanomami, the “land-forest-world” urihi a is not simply a collection of trees, nor is it a still life doomed to unbridled exploitation or nostalgic contemplation. On the contrary, it is conceived as a complex multiverse in which multiple living peoples, human and other-than-human, coexist at the cost of mutual compromise, whether they are visible to the eyes of “ordinary people” (kuapora thë pë) or only to those of “spirit people” (xapiri thë pë), who are the shamans. For the latter, oneiric traveling is an essential means of exploring this multiverse, so, on behalf of their community, they must constantly communicate, negotiate, or fight with their protagonists.

During sleep, the inner image of human beings, an immaterial component of the person that the Yanomami also call utupë, has the ability to detach itself from the body of the sleeper and move away from it. During such extra-corporeal wanderings, this image is therefore able to experience interaction and perception when it encounters its counterparts—every being has a utupë a image.

In the case of “ordinary people,” these oneiric experiences more often than not refer to everyday life, even if they involve a certain degree of detachment or distance: hunting and travel, visits and celebrations, romantic nostalgia and misfortune, appearances of animals and plants, of absent or deceased persons, etc. The dreams of shamans, on the other hand, are much more daring and take place in realms far removed from the human world. Thus, their spirits (xapiri pë) take hold of their utupë image to carry them away on their “paths of light” through the multiple dimensions of the cosmological space-time, propelling it both through different levels of the universe and back to the time of its origin, or even into the lair of evil beings of the forest (në wãri pë).

During the “dream time” (mãri tëhë), the extra-corporeal journey of the shaman’s image, which has become a xapiri spirit itself, embarks on a dizzying odyssey toward faraway metaphysical territories that remain unknown to “ordinary people.” As Davi Kopenawa explains: “We shamans possess the spirits’ value of dream inside ourselves. It is they who allow us to dream so far away. This is why their images constantly dance by our side when we sleep.”

This extraordinary human ability to “dream further” (thapimuu) is ultimately attributed to Omama a, the demiurge who created the current world and who, as the “primordial dreamer” (mãritima a), erected the “dream tree” (mãri hi) at the fringes of the forest he had just planted in the beginning of time. Ever since, the flowers of this tree allow sleeping humans to dream: “(…) Since then, it has sent us the dream as soon as this tree’s flowers blossom. This is how he put the dream in us, allowing our images to travel during our sleep.” For the Yanomami shamans, these are the flowers-images of dreams, mãri kiki hore.¹

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To make the power of this dreamlike thinking visible and known beyond his own world, Joseca has taken appropriation of certain traits of our figurative realism with which he was confronted in his community school as a teenager. Since then, he has transformed them at the service of a radically original style that could be described as “shamanic realism,” in reference to the famous literary genre of “magical realism.” Through his unique talent, Joseca invites us to open our minds and sensibilities to the knowledge and beauty of an ancestral way of life and thinking, the richness and diversity of which is relentlessly destroyed by our blind economic voracity, out of ignorance and greed.

 

 

 

(1) See Davi Kopenawa & Bruce Albert, 2015, The Falling Sky : Words of a Yanomami Shaman. Cambridge, Mass., London, England: Harvard University Press, chapter XXII.