Bajo la lluvia (Under the Rain)

One of the origin myths of the Uitoto nation tells the story of how Jiaño, mother of Summer, asked Nokikuriño, mother of Rain, to come to her aid so that her children could be saved. And that is how these curious deities, described as cicada and cricket, witnessed the awakening of nature. Singing a duet, they celebrated the moment when the sound of the storm and the wet surface of the forest made everything grow, move, and reproduce. Peruvian artist Rember Yahuarcani has dedicated his creative practice to recreating and transmitting the imaginative riches and ancestral wisdom of the Uitoto cosmogony. Through his colorful and carefully executed acrylic paintings, for which he also uses pigments extracted from plants, Yahuarcani narrates this and other stories that have been transmitted from generation to generation in the "minika" language. The time and place where his luminous characters exist emerge not only through the artist's imagination. The black background that is characteristic of his paintings conveys the synesthetic experience that animates mythical narratives, as stories of events that take place well beyond the visible realm. This imaginary place can also be understood as a non-place, a metaphor for the experience of uprooting endured by the artist's ancestors, survivors of the genocide carried out during the Colombia-Peru War -also known as the Leticia War- that forced them to abandon their territories. Recently, some of these oral narratives were collected in a book illustrated by the artist himself, an initiative that preserves his family memory, and the resilience and cultural legacy of the Uitoto-Áimeni.