{"id":733,"date":"2024-10-15T13:30:00","date_gmt":"2024-10-15T13:30:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.fondation-louisroederer.com\/finaliste\/ana-elisa-sotelo-sadith-silvano\/"},"modified":"2025-02-26T10:02:32","modified_gmt":"2025-02-26T10:02:32","slug":"ana-elisa-sotelo-sadith-silvano","status":"publish","type":"finaliste","link":"https:\/\/www.fondation-louisroederer.com\/en\/finalist\/ana-elisa-sotelo-sadith-silvano\/","title":{"rendered":"Ana Elisa Sotelo"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\n\n
\n
\n

Ana Elisa Sotelo<\/h1>\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n <\/header>\n\n
\n\n
\n
\n
\n

South America<\/h2>\n <\/div>\n\n
\n
\n

Nature and human interaction with the natural world are central themes in Ana Elisa Sotelo\u2019s visual work. After a life-altering spinal fracture in 2016 led her to discover the healing power of nature and traditional Amazonian medicine, her work has increasingly documented the intertwining of natural and spiritual health. Her featured series, Portraits of the Multiverse<\/em>, presents an interaction between photography and embroidery. Ana Elisa Sotelo has collaborated with the Peruvian artisan Sadith Silvano to create a dialogue between the visible and invisible worlds, underlining the deep connection between the Amazon and her ancestral art. In this way, she reminds us of the urgent need to preserve this irreplaceable ecosystem and its cultures. Anna Elisa Sotelo has won multiple awards for her work, including the International Women in Photography Award in 2021 for her project Las Truchas<\/em>, which celebrates the women swimmers of in Lima, Peru, a symbol of community resilience during the pandemic. <\/p>\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n\n\n\n <\/section>\n\n\n\n

\n \n
\n
\n \"Fondation

\u00a9 Ana Elisa Sotelo & Sadith Silvano, The Shanay-Timpishka River (part 1), Portraits of the Multiverse <\/p>\n <\/div>\n\n <\/div>\n\n\n <\/section>\n\n\n

\n
\n
\n
\n
\n

Ana Elisa Sotelo\u2019s practice not only provides an insight into the contemporary languages of photography and its potential by producing entanglements between the captured image and the ancestral Ken\u00e9 embroidery and painting techniques and history. It also deals with issues of sustainability questioning the colonial fracture that separates the human from the non human and produces an extractive world-system. I nominated her for the Prize because I believe this mode of approaching art practice is essential to shifting the way we perceive and experience the world.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n
\n

SOFIA DOURRON<\/p>\n

Nominator for South America<\/p>\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n<\/section>\n\n

\n\n
\n
\n
\n

About the series<\/h2>\n <\/div>\n\n
\n
\n

\u201cPortraits of the Multiverse<\/em> is an ongoing visual investigation between Sadith Silvano, master of the Shipibo Konibo \u201cKen\u00e9\u2019\u2019 artform and myself. Ken\u00e9 art illustrates the underlying vibrational makeup of the universe. This collaboration stems from a need to make the invisible visible and consists of embroidered photographs and accompanying videos.<\/p>\n

In this work, I showcase elements of Amazonia, while Sadith reveals the immaterial energy that flows across the jungle through embroidery. The images are captured on the banks of the Shanay-Timpishka and Nanay Rivers. Currently, this area, like much of the Amazon, is undergoing mass deforestation at an alarming rate. Primary forest is being cleared to make way for farmland, resulting not only in the loss of flora and fauna but also in a cultural shift and a change in the relationship between the people of the forest and the land. In a landscape where territory and culture are inextricably linked, the disappearance of forests leads to the disappearance of the spirits and soul of the jungle. The Shipibo people of the Amazon have been representing and making this world visible for thousands of years through the \u201cKen\u00e9\u201d art form. Shipibo women are trained from a young age to \u201csee\u201d and understand \u201cKen\u00e9.\u201d They access this world through song and the intake of sacred plants that reveal visions of this energy. Shipibo artist Sadith Silvano makes this world visible by embroidering \u201cKen\u00e9\u201d onto my photographs. Each piece represents an encounter between two universes: the material and the immaterial.<\/p>\n

In a transition from the invisible world to the visible and back to the invisible, this series develops a dialogue about the Amazonian multiverse. It is a visual encounter between two languages that capture light through different means: photography and embroidery.<\/p>\n

The result is this series of embroidered photographs that depict the rich diversity found in the Amazon, encompassing not only biodiversity, but also the culturally rich traditions of its people and art. Each piece seeks to document the importance of this vanishing landscape, highlighting the cultural and environmental aspects of Amazonia\u201d. \u2013 Ana Elisa Sotelo <\/strong><\/p>\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n\n\n\n <\/section>\n\n\n\n

\n
\n
\n
\n \"Fondation

\n \u00a9Ana Elisa Sotelo & Sadith Silvano, Portraits of the Multiverse <\/p>\n <\/div>\n

\n \"Fondation

\n \u00a9Ana Elisa Sotelo & Sadith Silvano, Portraits of the Multiverse <\/p>\n <\/div>\n

\n \"Fondation

\n \u00a9Ana Elisa Sotelo & Sadith Silvano, Portraits of the Multiverse <\/p>\n <\/div>\n

\n \"Fondation

\n \u00a9Ana Elisa Sotelo & Sadith Silvano, Portraits of the Multiverse <\/p>\n <\/div>\n

\n \"Fondation

\n \u00a9Ana Elisa Sotelo & Sadith Silvano, Portraits of the Multiverse <\/p>\n <\/div>\n

\n \"Fondation

\n \u00a9Ana Elisa Sotelo & Sadith Silvano, Portraits of the Multiverse <\/p>\n <\/div>\n

\n \"Fondation

\n \u00a9Ana Elisa Sotelo & Sadith Silvano, Portraits of the Multiverse <\/p>\n <\/div>\n

\n \"Fondation

\n \u00a9Ana Elisa Sotelo & Sadith Silvano, Portraits of the Multiverse <\/p>\n <\/div>\n

\n \"Fondation

\n \u00a9Ana Elisa Sotelo & Sadith Silvano, Portraits of the Multiverse <\/p>\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n

\n
\n
\n \"Fondation

\n \u00a9Ana Elisa Sotelo & Sadith Silvano, Portraits of the Multiverse <\/p>\n <\/div>\n

\n \"Fondation

\n \u00a9Ana Elisa Sotelo & Sadith Silvano, Portraits of the Multiverse <\/p>\n <\/div>\n

\n \"Fondation

\n \u00a9Ana Elisa Sotelo & Sadith Silvano, Portraits of the Multiverse <\/p>\n <\/div>\n

\n \"Fondation

\n \u00a9Ana Elisa Sotelo & Sadith Silvano, Portraits of the Multiverse <\/p>\n <\/div>\n

\n \"Fondation

\n \u00a9Ana Elisa Sotelo & Sadith Silvano, Portraits of the Multiverse <\/p>\n <\/div>\n

\n \"Fondation

\n \u00a9Ana Elisa Sotelo & Sadith Silvano, Portraits of the Multiverse <\/p>\n <\/div>\n

\n \"Fondation

\n \u00a9Ana Elisa Sotelo & Sadith Silvano, Portraits of the Multiverse <\/p>\n <\/div>\n

\n \"Fondation

\n \u00a9Ana Elisa Sotelo & Sadith Silvano, Portraits of the Multiverse <\/p>\n <\/div>\n

\n \"Fondation

\n \u00a9Ana Elisa Sotelo & Sadith Silvano, Portraits of the Multiverse <\/p>\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n

<\/div>\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n<\/section>\n\n
\n
\n
\n

An author’s view<\/h2>\n
\n About the author<\/span>\n

Luisa Elvira Belaunde Olschewski<\/p>\n

Luisa Elvira Belaunde Olschewski is an anthropologist and specialist in indigenous peoples of the Amazon. Within the area of indigenous ethnology, she has specialized in female perspectives, both in terms of their own cultural aspects and processes of change, interconnection with national society and interculturality. In the last decades, the proximity to Amazonian thought and creativity has led her to become interested in indigenous arts, especially in the Ken\u00e9 Shipibo-Konibo, on which she wrote a public policy document that culminated in the patrimonialization of indigenous graphics.<\/p>\n

Pictures also sing: photo-embroidery in the multiverse <\/strong><\/p>\n

Original version<\/em><\/p>\n

Photographs also sing. Their voice is an embroidered thread on their bodies made of paper. Such words come to mind when I see the artistic work of Ana Elisa Sotelo and Sadith Silvano. The photo-embroidery series Portraits of the Multiverse is born from the confluence of two different graphic epistemes that met at the Boiling River in the Peruvian Amazon, in the Ucayali basin, land of the Shipibo-Konibo people. Ana Elisa went there searching for healing with ancestral Amazonian medicines made from the bark of the Came Renaco trees growing on its banks. When she was undergoing her plant therapy, she made pictures of the river sanctuary and its steam. Back in Lima, she took her photos to Sadith in Cantagallo, the urban Shipibo-Konibo community in the polluted and hectic heart of the Capital.
\n\u201cTell me what you see in these photos I took of my relationship with the river and its plants,\u201d she requested and explained she had drunk Came Renaco and Ayahuasca during her healing journey. \u201cI felt many things, but don\u2019t know what happened. I could only take pictures of what I was seeing, as a visitor.\u201d Sadith looked at the photos with the eyes of someone who was raised in a family of visionaries. Since she was a child, she grew up surrounded by Ken\u00e9 and learned to find it, even if it were not visible, guided by the visionary skills she inherited from her elders. When Ana Elisa suggested she should intervene with her ancestral art in her photos, Sadith patiently hollowed out the embroidery path, opening pores on the paper before passing the thread through.<\/p>\n

Ken\u00e9 is a visual language of geometric patterns composed of strokes of varying thickness and color generating games of light and contrasts between background and figure. Its purpose is not so much to explicitly reproduce the figures of the beings around, as to reproduce what makes these beings capable of action. Ken\u00e9 catches the eye, forcing it to complete the figures that insinuate themselves between the lines without ever remaining fixed.<\/p>\n

Unlike photography, it does not capture the light of surrounding beings to reveal their images, but rather reveals and cleans up their usually invisible energy circuits, illuminating them through traces of color. This bright full energy, or as expressed in Shipibo-Konibo, Koshi, is a key feature of powerful cosmic beings with shiny skins, providing them with a hypnotic and fierce beauty. Such is the case of the spots on anacondas and big cats, both animals standing at the top of the forest predation chain, or the star-pierced path of the firmament and the veins of plant leaves that grant health, thought and skills.
\nThe work of crisscrossing photography and embroidery was done in polyphony, sometimes with convergent melodies, other times in independent routes. \u201cWater is a very strong healing space to me,\u201d claimed Ana Elisa, who swims regularly and water is a constant motif in her work. In the pictures Ana Elisa took, Sadith saw, dancing on the river steam, the designs of Ronin, the cosmic \u201cmother\u201d of water and Ayahuasca. According to Ana Elisa, when she drank Ayahuasca as part of her therapy, the very plant \u201ccalled out for other plants\u201d to come and gather in her healing. Sadith had also drunk Ayahuasca. \u201cIn my case, I got to talk with Mother Ayahuasca who is La Abuelita (The Endearing Grand Mother). She told me there are many kinds of Ken\u00e9 designs, the ancestral and the contemporary. Each woman works in her own way following her inspiration\u201d. That\u2019s why Sadith embroidered on the picture of an Ayahuasca leaf with red, yellow and green threads, some more recent curved designs as well some older designs with right angles, placing their lines \u201cface to face\u201d. Such a \u201cduality\u201d, she explained, \u201crepresents us, humans\u201d.<\/p>\n

In each new picture, each artist told her own life story. While Ana Elisa saw that she had taken a photo of her extended hand requesting help from the river and plants, Sadith saw that her own hand was portrayed as a vehicle of knowledge from her mother and sister. \u201cOur hand is magical; you receive, you also give. Thanks to my hand\u00b4s energy I am now the woman I am. I can do what I set my mind to, thanks to my Ken\u00e9.\u201d
\nThe flow of Ken\u00e9 Sadith embroidered on the picture moves onto Ana Elisa\u00b4s hand. The designs enter the photograph through its frame with a thick line tinted with blue, which moves in steps with broken angles and is superimposed on a thinner golden line, which moves in curves. Both threads arrange themselves on the palm of the hand forming a head-shaped pattern. Then, the golden embroidery frays over the wrist. It gives the impression of floating above its veins or, depending on how you look at it, of surging from its blood as a spring of Ken\u00e9 dancing up into the sky.<\/p>\n

Such a game of perspectives is what Sadith calls \u201cface to face\u201d: It applies everywhere, curved and broken, thick and the thin, what receives and what gives, what comes and what goes. Everything has its pair. \u201cDuality\u201d everywhere engenders the perceptive dynamism of Shipibo-Konibo art. The ghostly aesthetic of the river captured by the camera lens contrasts with the neat strokes of the Ken\u00e9 the camera did not see, calling into question what is real. Portraying the multiverse may mean trying to encompass all the versions of worlds that make it up, but this is never possible. Each version has its other side, which is never just its reverse image; and when one side is seen more clearly, the other one shallows, and transforms, in an incessant play between background and figure. Ken\u00e9 invites the viewer to flow along with multiplicity knowing that the visible and the invisible coexist in motion and may never be encapsulated in a fixed thoroughly comprising image.<\/p>\n

In the last picture of the series, the embroidered cloak embellishing the bather\/mermaid\u2019s tail \u201crepresents me,\u201d both artists said. Ana Elisa made a picture of herself swimming in her favorite \u201chealing space\u201d and Sadith saw in it her own image, \u201cmy own empowerment, my livelihood\u201d. Like a mermaid\u00b4s cloak, she explains, \u201cKen\u00e9 is my faithful companion. It never leaves me.\u201d She now lives and works in Lima, but even in the midst of urban frenzies, her Ken\u00e9 unlocks the healing energies hidden in Ana Elisa\u00b4s picture. Their photo-embroidery casts spells. It wraps us with the Amazon\u00b4s breathing waves. I wish I were a mermaid too. Maybe that\u2019s why such a seemingly dissonant phrase comes to mind: photographs also sing. Their bodies breathe in and out with the needle of Ken\u00e9. This photo-embroidery series is a masterfully achieved work of creativity and thought, each artist experimenting with their techniques in pas de deux, \u201cface to face\u201d.<\/p>\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n