Stefania Nirella Xapirimuu

Xapirimuu means, in the Yanomami language, to act as a spirit. It is a project that brings different gazes on the same territory into relation, inviting the viewer into the place of the image, where the concept of the border emerges as a space of possibility, tension and crossing between two ideas of the forest.

 

 

 

One is the forest objectified by the Western, colonial gaze, conceived as a surface that can be measured, classified, exploited –
a territory defined by borders drawn from outside.

 

The other is a dense relational web of perspectives, where plants, animals, rivers, mountains and xapiri – spirits, entities linked to the animal ancestors – have a subjectivity of their own.

 

And, as the Yanomami shaman and activist Davi Kopenawa recounts in La caduta del cielo, it is precisely the xapiri who, dancing and singing along paths of light during shamanic sessions, pass on teachings that make possible the crossing of perspectives and that relational network on which the whole balance of the forest depends.

 

The work therefore takes shape through the encounter between these two ontological systems and opens up a dialogue in which the image is not offered only as a place where things happen, but itself becomes an immersion, a practice of crossing, between visions that appear without ever becoming definitively fixed.

 

 

 

A research lasting many months, in which the residency period in the atelier was the moment of experimentation and development during which the artist gave form to some phases of the project.

Starting from the discovery of a series of archival military aerial photogrammetry surveys, experimentation in printing with the Gumprint technique, by subtracting some information during the printing process, made it possible from the very start to undermine the reliability of a precise cartographic calculation.

The work was then enriched by further steps:

botanical lumen print made with sunlight; GPS tracks of a Purple Martin – which migrates from North America to the Yanomami territories, sharing the consequences of an ecosystem under constant threat – which translate the bird's movement into a trace of light that resonates with the paths of light of the xapiri, since it records not only a presence or a movement but suggests its way of being in the world, perfectly in balance and in relation with everything else that inhabits it, and therefore in perfect harmony with the teachings of the xapiri themselves; and a reworked fragment of a photograph of a shamanic session taken by the photographer and activist Claudia Andujar during her stay with the Yanomami.

 

A work that clearly approaches light as a threshold, an interstice through which another way of making the world vibrates and can be sensed, leaving a trace of itself here in the image. The image, far from being a thing and revealing itself rather as a movement, an event that happens between the one who looks and what appears, becomes in this case, in a metamorphic encounter with the Other, also the expression of the urgency of a crossing of borders, in a taut dialogue between visible and invisible.

Xapirimuu is ultimately a journey into this movement. A map that is not offered as an already given place, but as an orientation: a space in which the border, instead of closing and separating, becomes porous and turns into a place of crossing – where the encounter with the Other is not resolved, but continually opens up to a redefinition of what appears.