PARIS, FRANCE.- The Cartier Foundation For Contemporary Art presents “Yanomami - Spirit of the Forest," on view through October 12, 2003. Yanomami, Spirit of the Forest brings international artists into contact with the shamans of Watoriki (Windy Mountain), a Yanomami village in the Brazilian Amazon. The ambition of this exhibition is not to lapse into exoticism or paternalism, but to connect our conception of images and representations with that of another culture, exploring how the traditional yet constantly evolving metaphysical world of the Yanomami echoes the various facets of the “savage mind” still at work in our society.



This exchange was organized in collaboration with the shamans of Watoriki and Davi Kopenawa, their spokesman. Consequently, Yanomami, Spirit of the Forest features neither tribal feather ornaments, nor any “Amerindian” or “crossover” art. Nor is this an ethnological or humanitarian exhibition. Treating Yanomami thought on an equal footing, this exhibition’s films, photographs, paintings, sculptures and video installations offer a web of correspondences relating to the major themes of the cosmological ideas and visionary experience of the eleven shamans of the village of Watoriki.



Yanomami, Spirit of the Forest has been organized by the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain in collaboration with Survival International France and the Brazilian Comissão Pró-Yanomami NGO (CCPY). This exhibition is conceived by Bruce Albert, head of research at the Institut de recherche pour le Développement (IRD, Paris), and Hervé Chandès, director of the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain.



The artists who traveled to the Amazon all stayed in the same Yanomami village, thus achieving unity of time, place and action. Others, also commissioned by the Fondation Cartier, worked with the materials produced in Brazil by the Yanomami.



Finally, there are several artists included in the exhibition who have had an interest in the Indians throughout their careers. All of them exposed their individual creative worlds to the Yanomami concept of shamanic images, in an attempt to bridge two completely different worlds.