Mother Plants and Struggling Women
Visions from Cantagallo

MAC Lima
(November 12, 2022 – March 19, 2023)

        This exhibition is the result of an invitation extended to Olinda Silvano (Reshinjabe) and the Non Shinanbo (Our Inspirations) women’s collective to rethink and represent the last two years of the health, social, and political crisis based on their concerns, urgent needs, and desires. Non Shinanbo is part of the Shipibo- Konibo people. They live in the Cantagallo community, located on the right bank of the Rímac River, in Lima, which is currently the most populous Indigenous settlement in an urban area of Peru.

                Between June 2021 and April 2022, thirty women of the Non Shinanbo group made nearly one hundred works in different sizes and materials, such as paintings on fabrics dyed with mahogany bark, paintings on canvas, embroidery, and fabric collages, among others. As a whole, the set, from which we present a selection here, offers an acute testimony to the community experience, the healing power of plants, solidarity among women, and the forms of collective care in a moment of emergency as a result of COVID-19.

Gala Berger, Miguel A. López and Olinda Silvano (Reshinjabe).

Photos by Philipp Scholz Rittermann.