When thunder had no name, greatness was clothed in green, and rivers had not yet become highways of water, they were already there. They spoke the language of water. They deciphered their keys. They struggled between silence and blood. Three thousand years ago, they decided to populate a forest 15 kilometres from Puka Allpa or red earth (Pucallpa, in Quechua), and all that remains of those young people with copper skin who transformed the quivering mud into amphorae and vases, who transformed a hollow trunk into a blowpipe and the bones of the blue macaw into bullets of mortal necessity.
Among other things, because they have maintained unwavering loyalty to their original worldview, their ethnographic models, and the depth of their spiritual world. Forming small villages on the banks of the Ucayali River and its tributaries, the Shipibo-Konibo phylogenetic family currently constitutes a respectable mass of 32,000 citizens spread across 150 communities.
One of them is David Díaz, who is 30 years old and bought his first camera just eight years ago. ‘That day, my heart was pounding and I never let go of that camera, so much so that I slept hugging it,’ he recalls. He then embarked on a wonderful learning curve. He has just won the Maravillarte prize for a photograph taken at his home. It shows a group of Shipibo women fixing their bangs and painting their lips. This is one of the works that make up ‘Portraits from my blood’, a careful immersion into the intimacy of their ancestral community. Spinners working their art with natural dyes and clay on tocuyo canvas. Mothers who reshape their children's skulls with wooden boards for purely aesthetic purposes. Children splashing in the lagoons formed by the rising waters of the Ucayali. Healers of the past practising their herbal wisdom. And, as a backdrop, the density of all that is green trapped in the black and white of an unseen forest.
It is in this interaction (between the objectification of the subject and the observer's inner gaze) that the voyeuristic lens of photography shifts towards the preservation of new forms of identity. Thus, Díaz portrays images of his community not as indigenous pamphlets but as historical documents. An extraordinary transition in which the traditional subject, modern subjectivity and the enchantment of nature find a frankly friendly relationship in the face of the inevitable Western gaze of an artist attentive to his historical context and ethnic identity.
Curiously, this same symmetry operates in Kené textile art: the principles of translation, mirror reflection, shifted reflection and rotation. Because, with absolute certainty, this is the origin of the energy discharge that moves their universe, as powerful as the immanent spiritual force of íkaro, that vibrational energy that travels from the shaman to his recipient, harmonising body and mind, the founding primitive serpent, source of all things and of the spirits of the forest.
Convinced of the holistic evolution of the world, the Shipibo believe that humans, plants, animals and other elements of nature have a common spirit called ibo. Everything indicates that these photographs are also possessed by him. Perhaps the faces portrayed emanate a sweet and clean air, while their aura projects a bright light onto the world. Then, a new aroma fills the interstices of the Earth. And the Shipibo song becomes a seed in the wind.
