artnexus #121

Sheroanawë Hakihiiwë (1971) is a Yanomami artist born in Sheroana, on the banks of the Upper Orinoco in the Amazon, near the Venezuelan–Brazilian border.

Mexican artist Laura Anderson Barbata organized a project designed to teach this community how to produce paper with organic fibers and recycled organic materials. Sheroanawë became fascinated by this process and since the early 1990s he began producing paper for his own drawings. In 1992, he founded, along with Anderson, the self-sustaining publishing project called Yanomami Owë Mamotima, which translates to “We, the Yanomami, learning to make paper.” With the initial aim to record the memories of his people, this self-taught artist developed a personal representation of his world and rescued images that are prone to disappear due to external interferences of Christian missionaries and others.

According to his own account, he recreates in his notebooks the characteristics of the natural world surrounding him, the customs of his community, and the ritual paintings they perform on their bodies. He records memories observed in the jungle, under threat by illegal mining and deforestation.

In an interview, the artist states: “I always choose symbols from my notebooks. I also talk to shamans about stories that we were told when we were children, involving themes like darkness and fire, which are important to us... I learned a lot from my mother, who did crafts and also painted.”*

Hakihiiwë’s work preserves the oral history of his community by representing their cosmogeny, as well as animals and plants that inhabit the jungle, thus enriching his own work with these elements. Nature ends up being a vast field of observation from which his language of straight lines, dots, circles, or triangles emerges, capturing in his drawings an ancestral history: that of his people.

* Gabriela Mesones Rojo, “Sheroanawe Hakihiiwe: hacer arte con todos los espíritus del mundo,” Cinco8, October 18, 2022, https://www.cinco8.com/perspectivas/sheroanawe-hakihiiwe-hacer-arte-con-todos-los-espiritus-del-mundo/