Opening
Tuesday, April 22, 2025, 7pm

April 22 – August 30, 2025

proyectoamil
Lima

proyectoamil is pleased to present the exhibition titled The Council of the Mother Spirits of the Animals by Celia Vásquez Yui, an artist, indigenous rights activist, and political representative of the Shipibo-Conibo people of Peru.

With this series, Celia Vásquez explores the connection between ancestral female figures and the contemporary viewer. Her work seeks to rescue and reinterpret the spirituality and wisdom of indigenous women in Peru, presenting them as guiding and protective animal spirits.

In The Council of the Mother Spirits of the Animals, Vásquez employs mixed techniques that combine traditional and contemporary elements, creating a visual experience that invites viewers to reflect on cultural heritage and identity. The figures represented in her works convey a powerful and mystical presence, establishing an intimate dialogue with those who observe them.

The connection with the viewer is achieved through visual composition, which evokes emotions and collective memories, allowing for introspection about our roots and the role of women in society. Vásquez aims for her art to serve as a bridge between the past and the present, fostering a sense of belonging and cultural continuity.

Born in the Amazonian city of Pucallpa in 1960, she began creating alongside her mother, an eminent ceramicist and descendant of the polychrome horizon cultures, whose archeological record throughout the Amazon dates back thousands of years. Balancing a cultural imperative for inventiveness with the constraints of traditional style, Celia Vasquez Yui has distinguished her practice through astonishing creative innovations, exploring and expanding the zoomorphic features of the style.

The Council of the Mother Spirits of the Animals is a collaboration with The Shipibo-Conibo Center and was first shown at Salon 94 in New York in 2022.

About the collaboration with the Shipibo-Conibo Center:

If the order of kené designs can be understood as a visual manifesto of the commitment to the core values of Shipibo ethics, and to protocols of conviviality, reciprocity, and kinship that extends beyond the human to animal, plant, land, and water, it is within these principles that the artistic collaboration between Celia Vasquez Yui and the Shipibo-Conibo Center is rooted.

This implies an understanding that the work of art, the work of environmental activism, and the struggle towards Indigenous sovereignty cannot be separated; they must move forward on the same path. ​

The Shipibo-Conibo Center collaborations are part of an effort intended to overstep the colonial paradigms that have separated Indigenous artists from the contemporary art setting. These partnerships aim to set up a model of how to possibly rejoin the realms of art, healing, ecology, and politics that were separated through colonial and neocolonial modes of extraction and representation.