Laura Anderson Barbata – Wayamou: Common Tongues at Museo Tamayo

Wayamou: Common Tongues. Laura Anderson Barbata and Sheroanawe Hakihiiwe. Exhibition views: Photographs by Gerardo Landa and Eduardo López (GLR Studio). Courtesy of Museo Tamayo.

Since her first journey to Mahekoto-Teri (Platanal) in Venezuela’s Amazonas State in 1992, Barbata has centered her practice on the exchange of knowledge. During that formative visit, she learned the art of canoe making from the Ye’kuana community and, in return, led a handmade papermaking workshop for young people and children from neighboring communities. Among the participants was a young Yanomami, Sheroanawe Hakihiiwe, who would go on to become an artist following this experience. This foundational moment established a shared trajectory rooted in dialogue, mutual learning, and respect for ancestral knowledge systems.

Over the decades, Barbata has developed a transdisciplinary practice that moves fluidly between art, activism, pedagogy, and community collaboration. Her work engages deeply with questions of ecology, spirituality, language, and collective memory, often through long-term projects embedded within specific communities in the Venezuelan Amazon, Trinidad and Tobago, Norway, the United States, and Mexico. One of her most significant ongoing initiatives, Transcommunality (2001–present), brings together stilt dancers, artists, and artisans from Mexico, New York, and the Caribbean, creating networks of solidarity and shared cultural expression across borders.

Wayamou: Common Tongues. Laura Anderson Barbata and Sheroanawe Hakihiiwe. Exhibition views: Photographs by Gerardo Landa and Eduardo López (GLR Studio). Courtesy of Museo Tamayo.

Within Wayamou: Common Tongues, Barbata’s work is presented alongside Hakihiiwe’s drawings and prints, which emerged in part from their early exchange. Inspired by Yanomami basketry and body painting, Hakihiiwe’s visual language records the marks, paths, and traces of the forest’s vast microscopic world (urjii). In recent years, his practice has increasingly reflected the social and ritual life of his culture, guided by processes shaped by the voice of the shaman (Shapori). Together, their works reveal a shared imaginary grounded in cosmogony, ancestry, and spirituality, while confronting urgent contemporary social and political realities.

The exhibition features more than one hundred works — including prints, drawings, paintings, sculpture, and documentary materials — tracing different stages of both artists’ trajectories from 1996 to the present. At its core is Barbata’s enduring commitment to reciprocity as an ethical and artistic principle. As co-curator Andrea Torreblanca notes, “reciprocity finds itself at a fragile and vulnerable moment; for this reason, telling the shared history of these two artists is more urgent than ever.”