Bárbara Palomino Ruiz
Cross patterns: paths to be able to return - Installation - 2015
presented as part of the exhibition Panorama 17
Interactive and multimedia installation inspired by the creation and the polysemic meaning of the geometric designs called Kené from the indigenous group Shipibo-Konibo from the Peruvian Amazon and in my interest in the evolution of technology based on different methods of pre-literate navigation, ancient textile techniques and mechanisms of representation.
The Shipibo-Konibo have established a close link between all things based on metaphorical thinking and on a generative model of time, where any past can be constructed from a manipulation of contents in the present. During the 1980s, a German anthropologist proposed that Shipibo ‘shamans’ could sing the designs as if the lines of the patterns embroidered on textiles or painted on the surfaces could be lines of sound. This idea of “pattern songs”, designs that could be sung as if they were coded music, was not part of the Shipibo-Konibo’s life before having been introduced by anthropologists. Yet this invented tradition was spread out and started to transform into reality. The geometric patterns which the Shipibo-Konibo creates reflect their vision of the world and they correspond to the shapes found on the skin of the ‘anaconda’. At the same time, they are interpreted as “paths designs”, as mappings of their physical and imaginary space. The lines of the patterns are representations and trails of the community or traces of navigating across the Ucayali river. Cartography of the life courses as well as the roads on which the spirits travel…
