MEMORIA presents Páro Ques̈há, a dialogue between the works of Roldán Pinedo (Yarinacocha, Peru, 1971) and Javier Silva Meinel (Lima, Peru, 1949) that presents elements from the heart of the Peruvian Amazon and the Shipibo-Conibo cosmogony. In the Shipibo language, páro ques̈há means being on the riverbank, that overwhelming sensation of observing the force of the water, or the uncertainty of its depth, or the beauty of the flow that runs between colors and choreographies.

In the Shipibo-Conibo culture, drawings enshrined on objects receive a spirit and come to life, once they become connected to a cosmic language. Paintings, ceramics, clothes and textiles, canoes or houses, all objects are sacred, and their spirits look after their owners, from the moment a drawing is printed on them. The kené, complex patterns in geometric and abstract constructions refer to the skin of Ronin, the great serpent creator of the universe, and are intuited and given by deities to Shipibo women and priests during religious ceremonies with ayahuasca.

Access to artistic thought is therefore understood as a contact with the mysteries of the divine, with the elevation of consciousness towards ancestral wisdom transmitted by the trees that guard the knowledge of history and life.

Roldán Pinedo (Shoyan Shëca, in Shipibo language) is a Shipibo artist currently residing in the community of Cantagallo in Lima. Through painting, the artist displays the multiple elements of the Shipibo-Conibo culture and its fundamental values. In this sense, he also explores a balanced symbiosis with nature through the understanding that all natural elements: men, animals, plants, rivers or stones, belong to this common organism and that they all have the same worth.

Pinedo highlights, for example, the importance of plants as mechanisms of connection with deities, of healing and of access to elevated thought. The trees painted in vibrant colours and exuberant shapes refer to dreams of the ancestral spirits they contain. The trees, their leaves and fruits, withhold the knowledge of the cure of illnesses, of sustenance and of the protection of the earth. Animals, spirits of equal importance, are also represented in prominence, paying homage to their forms and their fundamental presence in the balance of a complex system. The immaterial understanding of these values ​​is closely linked to an ecological knowledge about the food chains, pollination and preservation of resources in nature. Roldán Pinedo’s dreamlike universe operates in the construction of these ideas, while referring to free visual exercises, with marked tones and contrasts, brushstrokes of restraint and movement, and shapes captured from what is instructive and at the same time intuitive.

Roldán Pinedo also carries out his artistic practice from nostalgia and resistance, from the outskirts of Lima. Cantagallo is the largest urban community of the Shipibo-Conibo and arises after the displacement of people, facing external pressures to their traditional communities of origin. Once they enter the urban world, uprooting has translated into marginality, deprivation and oppression. The artist, in this sense, tries to represent dreams, memories and myths as elements of an alternative epistemology, of ancestral knowledge and, with it, the variant possibilities of learning and intercultural dialogue.

On the other hand, Javier Silva Meinel‘s work has focused on investigating and making visible the hidden contemporaneities that cohabit the world ‘from the margins’, in the face of the hegemony of the Western canon. For four decades, the artist has dedicated himself to traveling and strengthening ties with native Peruvian communities, reflecting through photography the intersections between reality and fantasy, between present bodies and their ancestral beliefs. This tension between the earthly and the spiritual is latent in the works carried out with the Shipibo-Conibo community and is manifested in a gaze that dignifies the subjects as archetypes of the ineffable beauty of a genuine and unbreakable humanity. To do so, Silva-Meinel explores the myths and knowledge of not only connection, but complete belonging to nature. With square and black and white formats, he explores the sensitivity of gazes and the depth of a deafening silence. Their contrast to Pinedo’s paintings, refers us to the physical and material reality and to the fact that the exotic dissolves if a common starting point is enabled.

The mythical serpent, Ronin, is the sky and the river, and on its skin are drawn all the designs of the universe. This universe that she herself has created, she also holds it coiled in each of its corners. The stars travel through her sky-river in canoes, thus marking the passing of the seasons, the times of abundance and scarcity. In the Shipibo-Conibo culture, creation and destruction are cyclical and give each other possibilities. Like a river in its floods and ebbs, the works of Pinedo and Silva Meinel flood the gaze with a magical and real contemporaneity, eroding some excluding normativity in order to open fertile spaces for legitimate aesthetics, ideas and knowledge.

In Páro Ques̈há, MEMORIA proposes an honest and permeable approach to these artists and to other ways of seeing and understanding the world. Faced with so many flaws in the dominant structures of the Western model, the construction of a common future will have to revisit pasts and presents that offer more just and balanced views on how to inhabit the world and how to relate to one another in it.