Until now. When Herve Chandes, director of the Cartier Foundation of Contemporary Art in Paris, became aware of the Yanomami a few years ago, he was intrigued by the concept of a society that didn’t represent itself through visual art. So he enlisted a dozen Western artists to interpret the Yanomami culture through photography, sculpture, painting and video installations. “We didn’t want to put on the typical exotic, voyeuristic view of the tribes–no feathers, no crudely made weapons,” Chandes says. “We wanted to have the artists develop a relationship with the shamans and then create works based on that dialogue.” The result is “Yanomami: The Spirit of the Forest,” a compelling exhibition (through Oct. 12) that captures the essence of the tribe’s culture through bold contemporary artistic expression.
Still, the tide of Western influence wasn’t unremittingly negative. In the early 1970s Bruce Albert, a French anthropologist living in So Paulo, set off for the jungles to study the Yanomami. About the same time Claudia Andujar, a German-born photographer who lived in Brazil, decided to dedicate herself to documenting their everyday life and shamanic rituals. Her photographs–10 of which are on exhibit at the Cartier Foundation–are warm and honest, depicting the Yanomami as round-faced Indians with rich, brown eyes and geometric markings painted on their skin. Her reportage–included in the show’s catalog–is harsher, describing Yanomami children dying in their mothers’ arms from Western diseases.
It was Andujar who piqued Chandes’s interest. About four years ago he picked up a magazine and saw two of her Yanomami photos in it. Fascinated, Chandes traveled to Brazil to meet Andujar, who in turn introduced him to Albert. Together they conceived the exhibit. “The notion of artists working with a community that doesn’t make images was very provocative,” says Chandes.
To help narrow the focus, they decided that the Western artists would work with one specific village that Albert knew well, called Watoriki, and its amiable spokesman, a shaman named Davi Kopenawa, who knows Portuguese. Albert took five of the artists to Watoriki last December. (Three artists relied on materials that the others brought back, and the remaining four worked with existing images of the Yanomami.) When they returned home, they set about creating works based on what they saw.
The results are astoundingly diverse and, for the most part, quite disturbing. By exploring the Yanomami world via contemporary methods, the artists have forced visitors to face Western culture’s swift, destructive impact on the planet’s indigenous peoples. Rogerio Duarte do Pateo, an anthropology student from So Paulo, made a riveting film called “Wayamu” that shows the shamans singing their ceremonial dialogues. American video artist Gary Hill participated in some of the shamanic rituals, even sniffing yakoana, the hallucinogenic powder that the shamans take to communicate with the spirits. Hill’s installation–a video of himself hanging upside down babbling unintelligibly–is meant to evoke his drug-induced mystical experience.
Some of the artists found their views profoundly changed by the experience. Raymond Depardon, a photographer known for his work in deserts, accompanied the Yanomami on hunting trips, which he documents both in photographs and in a 32-minute film. “I decided to keep it simple, to just sit back and watch,” Depardon says. “And what an experience it was. The hunters–how they moved! Such elegance. I concluded that they aren’t as primitive and we aren’t as rich as we think. In fact, they are richer and we are more primitive than we think.” The Cartier show offers a fascinating glimpse of the magic that can occur when those worlds collide.
