We explore the intersection between the diverse living cultures of Peru through our gallery and project space.
Xapiri Ground serves to secure and sustain economic autonomy, cultural traditions and the rights of Peru’s rainforest communities through the exhibition and development of creative projects.
Xapiri Ground explores how trade and cultural collaboration can fuel new visions for contemporary Indigenous realities and intercultural relations.
Xapiri Ground is a centre of Amazonian art that powers the autonomy and perpetuation of Peruvian Indigenous communities’ life-ways and cultural traditions through equitable cross-cultural exchange, inquiry, collaboration, skill share, and special projects.
Our work is about exploration and responsibility whereby we honor, observe, and relate directly with the communities and their cultural traditions.
Through the marketing and exchange of Indigenous art as buyer and seller, we create economic sustainability and positioning for the communities and their cultural heritage.
By acting from an awareness towards the issues that face Amazonian Indigenous societies and ecosystems can we be progressive cultural students.
We believe in the fair and just exchange of ideas, energy, and work to be balanced within our committed relationships to each community and vice versa.
In 2014 we asked the 'Hutukara Associação Yanomami' if we could use their word XAPIRI to give name to our organization. It is thanks to their consent, that we continue to carry this name forward with the utmost care and responsibility, honoring and in respect to the Yanomami cosmovision.
We share some words of wisdom from their leader Davi Kopenawa who, for over 20 years, has advocated globally for the Yanomami people with his message to defend the rights of Indigenous peoples which brings light to their fundamentally unique role in conserving the rainforest for the benefit of humanity...
"We Yanomami learn with the great spirits, the xapiri, we learn how to know the xapiri, how to see them and listen to them. Only those who know the xapiri can see them, because the xapiri are very small and bright like lights. There are many, many xapiri - not just a few, but lots, thousands like stars. They are beautiful and decorated with parrot feathers and painted with urucum (red berry paste). Some live in the sky, some underground, and others live in the mountains which are covered with forests and flowers.
Some live in the rivers, in the sea and others in the stars, or in the moon and the sun. The xapiri look after everything. The xapiri are looking after the world. Our shamans know that our planet is changing. We know the health of the Amazon. We know that it is dangerous to abuse nature, and that when you destroy the rainforest, you cut the arteries of the future and the world’s force just ebbs away.
The sky is full of smoke because our rainforest is being logged and burnt. The rains come late, the sun behaves in a strange way. The lungs of the sky are polluted. The world is ill. The forest will die if it is destroyed by the whites. Where will we go when we have destroyed our world? When the planet is silent, how will we learn? We have kept the words of our ancestors inside us for a long time, and we continue to pass them to our children. So the words of the spirits will never disappear.
And their story has no end.”
- Davi Kopenawa | Yanomami leader, activist, and shaman
