This video features an interview with Yanomami artist Sheroanawe Hakihiiwe (Sheroana, 1971), whose artistic training began with his family in the village of Sheroana, in Venezuela’s Amazon region. This learning, which today shapes his art, is rooted in listening to his elders and the shamans in the shapono (a Yanomami communal house and a space of ritual) and encompasses knowledge about community co-existence.   

In the 1990s, Hakihiiwe participated in an artisan paper-making workshop using natural fibres, leading him to make the support for his works, in addition to undertaking the task of compiling the knowledge of Yanomami women in the art of basketmaking and body painting. In his work, he recovers motifs and symbols that he synthetically translates in his drawings to represent the diversity of the Amazon ecosystem and to vindicate an ancestral model of living in symbiosis and co-existence with the territory and all forms of life in nature.