Son[i]a #417
Rember Yahuarcani López
Rember Yahuarcani López is a visual artist, curator, and activist hailing from the Áimenɨ (White Heron) clan of the Uitoto Nation in the northern Amazon of Peru. From his grandmother Martha López Pinedo he inherited an interest in oral tradition as a repository for the Uitoto worldview and myths. And from his parents Santiago Yahuarcani and Nereyda López, he inherited an artistic sensibility that establishes a dialogue between the indigenous ancestral past and the present. A self-taught artist, Rember learnt through producing handicrafts but also through tasks associated with the chacra (farm) and other shared community work—practices and temporalities that inform his artistic work. Thus, self-learning and having “good accompaniment” have anchored him and helped him circumvent paternalism, exoticisation, tokenism and other forms of assimilation and commodification of indigenous culture. Rember believes that the use of the term “contemporary indigenous art” entails a political exercise of agency and self-representation: a kind of vengeance by recovering and expanding the narrative and reflective voice of the history of his people, which was also plundered by European and mestizo urban anthropological theory and academicism.
In this podcast we talk to Rember Yahuarcani López about what “contemporary indigenous art” means to him, and about his own path to finding his place in the market. From this position, he can speak of himself in the first person, expand the notion of contemporaneity, and preserve and translate the Uitoto worldview and the oral traditions he has inherited, in an attempt to leave the imprint of the ancestral memory of a community in danger of extinction. And in this sense painting—like myths—emerges as a magical activity.
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