2017-2019 → Quircabue Yuiyui (Speaking with the books)

Video projection on paper. Objects: branches, coconuts, turtle-shell, green blackboard paint, chalk, Pahoyan, Ucayali region, Peru, 2017

Exhibited in: "The shadow is waiting for the full moon," Obrońców Stalingradu 17, Szczecin, 2017 
"The relative naive", Gallery Weisser Elefant, Berlin, 2019

According to a dictionary published in 1904 by Karl von den Steinen, the word for ‘reading’ in the native Amazonian Shipibo language is ‘Quircabue Yuiyui’, which he translated to ‘speaking with the books’. Succeeding Western researchers related the phrase to Shipibo’s own artistic practice of painting geometrical designs on various objects, textiles and pottery, a practice depicted in songs and oral histories. HHowever, in modern Shipibo language, there is no apparent reminiscence for the phrase. The video was recorded unpremeditatedly during nighttime, with children from the village of Pahoyan (Jean-Brayce, Lucy, Anita, and Andres) while they were reading and inspecting various academic papers and photographs about the Shipibo language and design that I had brought with me.