SANTIAGO YAHUARCANI
Santiago Yahuarcani( b. 1960, Pebas, Peru) is a visual artist and family leader of the White Heron clan in Peru. He identifies as part of the Uitoto-Aimen + people, and his work reflects the memory of atrocities committed by the rubber extraction industry as well as the power of unseen beings in light of the issues the Amazonian region faces today. He lives in the Pebas community, on the banks of the Amazon, where he was born. There, as a young man, he experimented with painting on llanchama— a plant fiber used as a canvas by the Bora and Uitoto peoples. In recent years, Yahuarcani’ s work has captured the memory of his people as passed on by his mother, Martha López, who experienced forced migration from the Putumayo River during the rubber boom. In Amazonía II( 2022), the landscape takes on human form; the milk flowing from the rubber tree is also the blood of a mother bleeding to death. The title“ Amazonia” speaks to the pain of this entire region, a history of suffering shared by all Indigenous peoples of the Pan-Amazonian countries.( CHRISTIAN BENDAYÁN)
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