The Council of the Mother Spirits of the Animals is an installation of zoomorphic ceramic sculptures by artist and activist Celia Vásquez Yui. The work alludes to a spiritual understanding of ecology, according to which every genus is endowed with a mother spirit. An assembly of forest creatures on a platform evokes a ritual gathering, or a parliamentary chamber, hinting at interspecies communication and asserting the rights of nature.
The figures return the viewer’s gaze with inquisitive energy. This reciprocity reflects a defining feature of the material production of the Shipibo – the Indigenous group from the Peruvian Amazon to which Vásquez Yui belongs – where looking at art also entails the possibility that art might do something back. That possibility arises from the powers of kené, their distinctive visual language with optical qualities thought to trigger subtle transformations in the perceiver, functioning as “design medicine”. Vásquez Yui conceives her role as a shaman. However, her focus is not on treating the individual but rather on collective and environmental health.
Vásquez Yui doesn’t simply make pots. Her vessels, made of materials sourced hundreds of kilometres apart along the Ucayali River, are maps of the ancestral territory that stands at the heart of the Shipibo struggle for sovereignty as an Indigenous Nation.
—Matteo Norzi
