In recent biennials and exhibitions, there has been a shift in interest toward Indigenous and precolonial practices and ancestral spiritualities that offer a sharp contrast to a failing Western model built on anthropocentric, individualistic materialism and extractivism. More Indigenous artists are entering the art world, no longer confined to the biased ethnographic lens that long shaped the Western narrative, but finally being recognized as living cultures and contemporary practices, with much to teach the rest of us.
Sara Flores, a Peruvian artist from the Shipibo-Konibo community, has risen to international acclaim in recent years and is now represented by major galleries including White Cube and Clearing. In recent months, her pieces have been acquired by leading New York institutions, including the Met and the Guggenheim, while other major museums have already added her work to their collections (Tate London, the Hammer Museum and the Museum of Fine Arts in San Francisco among them).
For Matteo Norzi, Flores’s agent, these institutional acquisitions reflect a growing need for a paradigm shift. “It has been a perfect storm,” he tells Observer, reflecting on how, with the onset of COVID, people stopped and reconnected with the earth. At the same time, the growth of social media heightened awareness of mental health issues, while psychedelic medicine began to see a resurgence. “All these things have created a new possibility for Indigenous art.” Amid the failure of politics—both right and left—on environmental and societal matters, people are turning to these Indigenous ideas with hope. “I think this is part of a positive search for a paradigm shift.”
As we were finalizing this article, Norzi received word that Flores had been selected to represent Peru in the forthcoming Venice Biennale, with a presentation called “From Other Worlds,” which he will curate with Issela Ccoyllo. Behind the artist’s rise is a story of human connection and solidarity that spans continents—a tale of a grassroots initiative that blends cultural preservation, promotion and diplomacy, beginning with an individual creative journey and expanding to embrace the fate of an entire community and its ancient yet still vibrant culture.
Norzi, an artist and filmmaker, came to work with Sara (and to dedicate himself to the Shipibo community) after embarking upon a radical life change. Years ago, he traveled to the Amazon for an ayahuasca retreat with a friend, Argentinian artist Leonor Caraballo. On that trip, both realized they were chasing illusions in the art world—things they could never truly grasp and that would never truly satisfy them. “First, there was that disconnection from the art world, and then we discovered an incredible story, a magical place and the energy to make a film.” At the same time, Caraballo also learned of a terminal illness during an ayahuasca vision, and the film they were making evolved into the story of a woman from the West who travels to the Amazon seeking a miracle through alternative therapies with Amazonian plants. Titled Icaros – A Vision, it was the product of their deep exploration of Indigenous Shipibo-Konibo culture in the Peruvian Amazon; it premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival in 2016.
“We threw ourselves into this cinematic adventure, which became a quest to collect and represent Indigenous artists in the field of contemporary art, almost as a strategy to demonstrate that Indigenous ideas are contemporary even outside the art world,” Norzi recounts, describing what would become a longer-term mission with the Shipibo community.
That first experience also made him aware of the many obstacles—visa issues, stereotypes, bureaucracy—that the Shipibo faced. These and other barriers prevented them from bringing their art and culture to international audiences, especially in the wider global art world. From that moment, Norzi decided to serve as a bridge and intermediary, promoting and preserving the creative lifeways and knowledge of the Shipibo-Conibo people of the Peruvian Amazon through the Shipibo Conibo Center, founded in Harlem. The center also became a way to commemorate and honor his friend’s visionary spirit after her passing from cancer soon after.
From the outset, Norzi’s primary goal was to challenge colonial paradigms and instead support Indigenous sovereignty and autonomy, bridging the realms of art, healing, ecology and politics to show how Shipibo-Konibo culture and lifeways can serve as epistemic, academic and practical alternatives to the failures of the Western and Eurocentric worldview.
The focus on Indigenous self-determination and territorial sovereignty is particularly central to the Shipibo Conibo Center. At the heart of its mission is the conviction that Indigenous identity is not confined to a romanticized past but is anchored in a technologically advanced and sustainable future. “I think it’s interesting to look at Indigenous culture from a postmodern perspective and recognize that it survived despite 500 years of colonialism. It is still alive and can have an effect on the future,” asserts Norzi. “The most important thing is to stop associating them with something that no longer exists and look at what is present.”
“Visual arts, music and ethnobotanical research are inseparable realms for the Shipibo-Konibo lifeway,” he explains. “Once we identified these areas of action, we aimed to address all artistic issues with political awareness, and all organizational problems with creativity and the way artists work. In this way, we’ve also tried to break and reinvent the traditional paradigms of philanthropy.”
Importantly, the center’s model—both operational and economic—was conceived in constant consultation with community members. “I think of a collective made up of all my friends, indigenous leaders, collaborators, lawyers, artists,” Norzi says. “I feel part of their family because they make me feel that way, but in some way, it’s always been more about what we’ve learned than what we had to teach.”
What Norzi brought to the Shipibo was his experience and expertise in the art world. Yet, he admits that during filming, while guiding the shamans in front of the camera, the Shipibo were, in turn, directing them. “In some way, there’s no real hierarchy; everything is much more equitable.”
It is on this principle of reciprocity that he bases his work. “There is a message that guides the Shipibo-Konibo: we are all part of the same family, and this idea of tribe extends to animals, plants, spirits, forests,” he explains. “From this, it somehow becomes natural to talk about ‘activism,’ or combining art and activism, because the two things are not distinguishable from the indigenous perspective. The idea is that the artist is a ‘healer,’ a person who takes care, a doctor.”
A key source of fundraising for the Shipibo Conibo Center has been the sale of the Shipibo people’s creative output abroad, which has led to their art finding its place in the contemporary market. In addition to giving Sara Flores’s work international visibility, Norzi is also working with other artists from the community, including Celia Vasquez Yui, who has been showcased with Salon 94. The profits from these sales are distributed equally between the artists and the community.
Though the Shipibo value mutual exchange and do not place importance on possessions or individualism, the center’s model still seeks to recognize individual effort and authorship. “We always talk about collective knowledge when discussing Indigenous knowledge, and there’s truth in that: many of these aspects are collective,” Norzi says. “But talking about collective knowledge has also facilitated expropriation because if it belongs to everyone, it seems like it belongs to no one.”
For this reason, the center has prioritized authorship. When Flores collaborated on a recent collection with Dior, it was not the Shipibo people who collaborated but Flores as an individual. “There’s a recognition of the individual effort and the energy that drives Sara every morning to go to the studio and paint,” he adds.
Regarding the division of earnings, they asked the artist to define her own idea of reciprocity. With Flores, they arrived at a fair distribution that supports her, the school and Indigenous organizations fighting for territorial resistance. “We call it a reciprocity agreement, a pact of solidarity, so that art and activism and the struggle for Indigenous sovereignty cannot be separated.”
In that spirit, even when collectors or institutions acquire works by these artists, Norzi stresses the importance of the fact that they are supporting living cultures and communities. “It’s important that those who buy are not just doing so out of the desire to possess an object but also to give back.”
Norzi acknowledges that he didn’t invent this model from scratch but drew inspiration from regulations already in place for the trade and circulation of Aboriginal artists in Australia, adapting them to the specific context of Shipibo-Konibo culture.
When asked if this model could be replicated by gallerists to more fairly bring contemporary Indigenous artistic expressions to the international art world, Norzi recognizes the challenges—primarily difficulties related to the pace and structure of today’s global art industry. “You need to spend a lot of time with the artists and with the community, and I believe the current art system simply doesn’t allow that. An artist liaison doesn’t have the time to go into the forest and immerse themselves in the culture and community as we do. It was possible for us because we also made a radical life decision to disconnect from FOMO, and we decided to give ourselves the space to take long pauses and embrace their lifeways and pace.”
Change at the institutional level
It has now been more than a decade since the Shipibo Conibo Center launched,and many changes have taken place. “It’s been a process of discovering new things, learning from mistakes, and we’ve learned to make others. I can’t tell you that at the beginning we knew what we were doing, but we had a strong vision,” Norzi admits.
From the start, most of the Shipibo-Conibo population has been very open to collaboration. Their philosophy of life, he explains, already conceives of existence as continuous vital evolution—a flowing process that embraces change and innovation. “The Shipibo are open to change because they have such a strong identity that they don’t fear the future. Instead, they want to claim their space, a place in the future. Of course, there are 35,000 Shipibo, so there are also very different opinions. Some are more conservative, others are more open, but overall, I must say it’s always a joy to encounter that kind of openness.”
Flores’s practice channels ancient wisdom and spirituality—her work speaks of the vital intertwining of all beings, an entanglement of energies, matter and forces that connect human life to the cosmos, linking the micro and macro within a universal order. Her kené designs can be read as a visual manifesto of her commitment to the core values of Shipibo ethics, and to protocols of conviviality, reciprocity, and kinship that extend beyond humans to animals, plants, land, and
Today, we see widespread hunger for new ways of inhabiting the planet, and in that context, Flores’s work feels particularly relevant and resonant. It conveys a feminine sensibility that organically intertwines with environmental awareness and care for the collective—standing in direct opposition to the prevailing model of testosterone-driven power, money and dominance.
Yet Flores has also embraced innovation, painting on canvas to bring this tradition into the present. Even the labyrinthine, psychedelic maps and constellations she traces are in continuous evolution: never the same from one work to the next, as she follows the directions suggested by the flow of energies and wisdom, attuning herself to something beyond physical and material existence. Her practice embodies continuous change, transformation and renewal.
That same longing for change, however, now threatens the survival of the Shipibo-Conibo, as new technologies and social media encourage younger generations to abandon their traditions in favor of Western lifestyles. “It’s a critical moment,” states Norzi. “For that, we have a role to play here because traditional forms of transmitting knowledge no longer work. Take a person, 70 years old—when they get sick, they go into the forest to search for plants, compared to their granddaughter, who spends the whole day on TikTok. When she gets sick, she goes to the pharmacy and no longer speaks Shipibo.”
To address this, last year they opened Multiversidad Bakish Mai, a nonprofit school and intergenerational cultural center dedicated to transmitting Indigenous knowledge with a focus on ecology, food sovereignty, plant medicine, art, political education and territorial sovereignty. Operating in the heart of Shipibo territories, the Multiversidad Bakish Mai works to preserve, revitalize, and transmit the knowledge embedded in Shipibo-Konibo-Xetebo worldviews and lifeways. The name itself carries this message, Norzi explains: “Bakish Mai can be translated as the land of yesterday and tomorrow. The cyclical understanding of time, as the Shipibo conceive the world, embodied in this continuity.”
They have also launched a legal program with nine lawyers, some of whom are Shipibo speakers, providing legal defense and free services to Indigenous communities facing environmental crimes. Alongside this is a nature conservation initiative located within Shipibo territories rather than in Lima, offering an alternative to state-led conservation models that remain too distant. “We want to try to create something more bottom-up with our Indigenous partners, where local communities are at the center of decision-making.”
A decade later, Norzi agrees that things have also shifted in the art world. Returning to where this story began, Indigenous practices are increasingly visible in institutional settings. Flores’s recent major acquisitions are evidence of a surge of interest and appreciation. “These years of work have materialized in an impressive way in the last few weeks, meaning we’ve somehow managed to change the museum collections and have this part recognized.”
Yet he also reminds us that it’s crucial that these artists be presented at the same level as their international peers—not as part of a cluster, but as contemporary creators who may channel ancient traditions, yet whose culture is still alive.
What must be avoided is the perpetuation of the old museographic tradition that treats this art as an “ethnographic object.” Instead, it must be recontextualized on equal footing with other non-Indigenous practitioners. “We come from a past of apartheid, where if you were Indigenous, you were elsewhere and something else,” Norzi says. “With that approach, museums were doing a sort of epistemicide—a cultural genocide—to prevail over these other ways of knowing.” He finds it far more compelling to explore the role Indigenous works can play in group exhibitions that reframe these practices within a universal creative common of beliefs and aesthetics resonating across cultures. Work by Flores, for example, could be paired with Agnes Martin or with the work of Arte Povera artists who explored nature as a theme.
These acquisitions, he adds, come with responsibility, particularly when it comes to art-washing. Norzi points out that many of these museums still have board members and supporters who actively contribute to the destruction of alternative ways of life, including those of Indigenous communities.
Still, this is only the beginning, and Norzi is convinced that Indigenous artists like Flores will become increasingly relevant as humanity faces the dual crises of a worsening climate emergency and a crisis of empathy. “We’re in a moment where everyone is thinking only of themselves, but I believe these values of reciprocity and connection with nature have the hope of being realized. People now have the desire to reclaim these values that their art conveys.”
For Indigenous artists, entering these platforms is not about validation but about reaching a stage where they can speak directly, point fingers and raise issues that might be easier to address in the safe space of art than in Parliament or the political arena. From there, they can share a call for a more sustainable existence, grounded in the awareness of the natural entanglement we all belong to and are responsible for.
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