Ogwa and Salmi

Hervé Chandès, a dear friend and the director of Fondation Cartier, introduced me to Fredi Casco and Fernando Allen. They are engaged in remarkable work for the indigenous communities of Paraguay in the Chaco region.
At the "Siamo Foresta" exhibition, presented by Triennale di Milano and by Fondation Cartier pour l'Art Contemporain in Milan, I encountered several artworks and noted their exceptional aesthetic quality! Our understanding of the culture of our Paraguayan neighbors remains quite limited.
During a meeting at the Estação in São Paulo, Fredi acquainted me with the historical contributions of Ishir Ogwa, now deceased, and his granddaughter Salmi. I was immediately captivated. I proposed that we jointly introduce the grandfather and granddaughter, who are still relatively unknown here, to the Brazilian public.
I extend an invitation to everyone to immerse themselves in the visual culture of this Ishir family from Paraguay.

Vilma Eid

The Dance of Myths
Ogwa and Salmi 
Grandfather and granddaughter

"The past is like a depth where legend dwindles to a cry. When compared to human experience, the Christian era is but a fleeting moment, like a lost eyelash in the eye of time."
Pascal Quignard

"And the silence that surrounds words is always laden with images."
Ticio Escobar

The erratic Dust Devil crosses the main street of Pohir Kahir (labão tree), propelled by the warm winds filling the late afternoon in the small ishir community. Although these "ancient words" still echo in the collective memory of the community situated in the depths of the Paraguayan Gran Chaco, the anachronism soon dissolves alongside the devilish swirl of dust, which gets lost among the trees separating the village from the Paraguay river. Suddenly, like a mirage shattered by the last rays of sunlight, the place acquires another name, no longer ishir. It is now called Puerto Diana.
In primordial times, words were instituted by the great goddess Ashnuwerta and the Anabsoro, the gods who emerged from the earth and the river, bringing forth "culture," as the ishir sometimes denominate their rituals. Everything named by these ancient words is deeply touched by another meaning, which always eludes us, Westerners. Even imagery, because like in many cultures, the ishir use both - word and image - to express the diverse forms of the sacred. These gods, in creating the word, facilitated the expression of the founding myth of their society. It only remained to make it visible, to transform it into an image through the rite. However, as observed by Ticio Escobar, "...both myth and rite operate in distinct ways, each employing its specific rhetorical resources: while one works with words, the other employs images. Hence, each on its own evokes distinct meanings". From there stems the extreme complexity of the approach.
The arrival of the white man brought with it the appropriation of their lands and the attempt to abolish the most primordial words and forms. A slow and silent ethnocide. Despite this, some rituals, especially the Debylyby, the great ishir ceremony, although agonizing in their energies and colors that form it, survived, almost secretly, first in the heart of the Chaco jungle, and later, recovered in some riverside communities of the Upper Paraguay, where fundamentalist evangelization was wreaking havoc through acculturation, among other calamities. Since then, from time to time, the gods become visible again through the men who represent/incarnate the numinous power of their voices, their sounds, and the brilliance of their extraordinary forms. Then the sacred truth is revealed like lightning, and it illuminates - sometimes, even if only for a moment - the primordial scene. Ogwa (circa 1937 - 2008), baptized by the white men as Flores Balbuena, sought to survive between these worlds so distant from each other: the primordial forms that connected the ishir to the beings of the Earth and the firmament; and a new world subjugated, exploited to exhaustion by an unprecedented exploitative neocolonialism in that territory.
As an informant of the great anthropologist Branislava Susnik and other scholars of ishir culture, between the mid and late 20th century, he had the important task of transmitting the stories and practices that reveal the rich cosmogony, which also sustains the entire complex social and cultural fabric of his people. And he accomplished this both through detailed oral accounts and through exquisite drawings, his case, in the words of anthropologist Ana María Spadafora, being "the first figurative plastic expression of a people whose traditional creative manifestations were encrypted in abstract motifs and linked to body painting." The formal sophistication of his drawings - and the narratives contained within them - finally determined that his work was accepted by the canons of the Western circuit, no longer as part of memory archives or ethnographic reports, but as artistic expression. Thus, we are left with an extraordinary, invaluable legacy to this day.
Salmi López Balbuena (1982), Ogwa's granddaughter, now walks the dusty streets of Puerto Diana. With her grandfather, she learned to draw while listening to his stories about gods and shamans. Indeed, her early works recall certain aesthetic patterns linked to those of Ogwa. However, over time, she acquired her own viewpoint, without breaking away from the stories and traditions linked to the spiritual and religious universe of the ishir. Among her recent paintings, charged with drama, movement, and intense colors, powerful monochromatic representations of shamans have begun to appear in her repertoire, those who journey through the night of times to the ends of the Earth. Like her grandfather, Salmi uses imagery to prevent, like the Dust Devil, the great mythical whirlwind created by the gods at the birth of the Earth, from dissipating into the wind and oblivion.

Fernando Allen and Fredi Casco 
Curators

Galeria Estação presents the first international exhibition composed of works by Ogwa and Salmi López Balbuena, exponents of Paraguayan indigenous art.

Curated by Fredi Casco and Fernando Allen, with a catalog signed by critic Ticio Escobar, the exhibition "The Dance of Myths – Ogwa and Salmi, grandfather and granddaughter" establishes, through drawings and acrylic paintings, generational connections preserved by the cosmogony, rites, and myths of the Ishir people.

Opening on June 18 and running until July 27, 2024, the exhibition "The Dance of Myths – Ogwa and Salmi, grandfather and granddaughter" presents to the São Paulo public a series of six drawing-paintings by the Paraguayan indigenous artist Ogwa (circa 1937-2008) and 36 paintings by his granddaughter, Salmi López Balbuena (1982), exponents of the Ishir people's indigenous art, a community located in Puerto Diana, on the banks of the Paraguay River and north of the Gran Chaco. The first major international exhibition to establish dialogues between the poetics of Ogwa and Salmi, the show, organized by Galeria Estação in the year it celebrates two decades of activity, also highlights generational connections permeated by Ishir ancestry.

“The importance of Ogwa's work begins when he was an informant for the renowned Hungarian anthropologist Branislava Susnik in the 1950s. Providing accounts of cosmogony, rites, and myths, accompanied by his drawings, Ogwa eventually became the first indigenous person recognized as a contemporary artist in Paraguay. Salmi, who grew up with her grandfather, his stories, and his accounts, also learned to draw from him. The difference between the grandfather's and the granddaughter's art is that Salmi worked with her own perspective, incorporating acrylic painting, colors, and movements, but the story is the same: of accounts, initiations of the Ishir culture through myths, rites, and ceremonies of this Ishir world of the Upper Paraguay,” explains Fredi Casco, who co-curates with Fernando Allen.

Former Minister of Culture of Paraguay and founder of the Museum of Indigenous Art of Paraguay, with more than twenty books published on art and culture theory, critic and curator Ticio Escobar, who signs the catalog of "The Dance of Myths – Ogwa and Salmi, grandfather and granddaughter," argues that Ogwa's creations constitute a vigorous and unparalleled figuration “neither in his own culture nor in Western art.” Among the most relevant exhibitions of his works are "Mémoires Vives – 30 years of the Fondation Cartier," in 2014, in Paris; "El cielo Ishir: Relatos cosmogónicos del Chaco Paraguayo," organized in conjunction with the Embassy of Paraguay in Spain, at the Museo de América in Madrid, in 2023; and "El legado de Ogwa," at the Centro Cultural del Lago, in Asunción, in 2024.

“Ogwa's vast knowledge of Ishir myth and ritual, combined with his experiences and driven by a marvelous imagination and great personal talent, led him to inaugurate his own genre within the visual arts of our country, whose collection is enriched with new energies, different points of view, and other ways of approaching representation. (...) Ogwa spoke at length, as the Ishir do, and illustrated simultaneously, resulting in hundreds of drawings that, at a certain point, began to be made outside of ethnographic information and colored without losing the determining reference of the line. Thus, encouraged by the art market and the whims of creation, his drawings gained autonomy and became paintings or, rather, drawing-paintings,” explains Escobar.

Impacted by the exhibition "Siamo Foresta," shown at the Milan Triennial in 2023, bringing together works by 27 artists from indigenous communities in different Latin American countries, Vilma Eid, co-founder of Galeria Estação, also had her first contact with the curators who now present the selected works for the exhibition "The Dance of Myths – Ogwa and Salmi, grandfather and granddaughter."

“Hervé Chandès, dear friend, director of the Fondation Cartier, a French cultural institution that has Ogwa's works in its collection, introduced me to Fredi Casco and Fernando Allen. They do wonderful work for the indigenous people of Paraguay, in the Chaco region, and we know very little about our neighbors' culture. Already in São Paulo, in a meeting at Estação, Fredi introduced me to the historical work of Ogwa and his granddaughter, Salmi. My enthusiasm was immediate. I proposed that we present the grandfather and granddaughter to the Brazilian public, still unknown here. I invite everyone to dive into the visual culture of this Ishir family,” concludes Vilma.

About Galeria Estação

Founded in late 2004 by Vilma Eid and Roberto Eid Philipp, Galeria Estação has established itself by revealing and promoting the production of non-erudite Brazilian art, playing a decisive role in including this language in the contemporary artistic circuit by publishing works and holding solo and group exhibitions under the gaze of the country's leading curators and critics. Estação's artists have also achieved international recognition by participating in exhibitions such as "Histoire de Voir," at the Fondation Cartier pour l’Art Contemporain (France), in 2012, and the Biennial "Entre dois mares – São Paulo | Valencia," in Spain, in 2007. A landmark of this international performance was the solo exhibition "Veio – Cícero Alves dos Santos," in Venice, parallel to the Biennale of Arts, in 2013. In Brazil, the gallery's artists also have their works in the collections of major collectors and prestigious institutions, such as the Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo, the São Paulo Museum of Art, the Afro Brazil Museum (SP), the Pavilhão das Culturas Brasileiras (SP), the Itaú Cultural Institute (SP), Sesc São Paulo, the Museum of Modern Art of Rio de Janeiro, and the MAR, in Rio de Janeiro.

About Fredi Casco

Fredi Casco is a visual artist, poet, curator, and documentarist. He is the current artistic director of the Texo Foundation for Contemporary Art, in Asunción. His works are part of the permanent collections of institutions such as the Cartier Foundation for Contemporary Art, in Paris, France; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in New York, and the Kadist Foundation San Francisco, in the United States; the Bank of the Republic Museum, in Bogotá, Colombia; and the Mud Museum, in Asunción.

About Fernando Allen

Photographer, editor, and cultural manager in Paraguay, he has been active since 1984. In 1986, he founded Photosíntesis, the country's first photo gallery, which has also operated as a publisher since the early 1990s, producing and editing more than forty books to date. As a photographer, he has participated in more than fifty solo and group exhibitions in Paraguay, Brazil, Argentina, Bolivia, the USA, Puerto Rico, the Caribbean, Spain, and Portugal.

About Ticio Escobar

World-renowned in intellectual circles, Ticio Escobar is a curator, professor, and cultural promoter. He served as president of the Association of Indigenous Communities of Paraguay, director of Culture of Asunción, and Minister of Culture of Paraguay from 2008 to 2013. He was director of Culture of the Municipality of Asunción from 1991 to 1996, and is president of the Paraguayan Chapter of the International Association of Art Critics. He has received several honors, including the Bartolomé de las Casas Award for his support of indigenous causes in the Americas. He is currently the director of the Visual Arts Center Museo del Barro, in Asunción.

SERVICE

"The Dance of Myths – Ogwa and Salmi López, grandfather and granddaughter"

From June 18 to July 27, 2024

Opening: Tuesday, June 18, 2024, from 6 p.m. to 9 p.m.

Galeria Estação

Rua Ferreira Araújo, 625 – Pinheiros, São Paulo

Visiting hours: Monday to Friday, from 11 a.m. to 7 p.m. Saturdays, from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. Free admission.