From June 13 – September 14, 2025, the Círculo de Bellas Artes in Madrid, Spain, presents Somos raíces, an art exhibition that brings together the work of self-taught artists and partners Santiago Yahuarcani and Nereyda López. Curated by critic, editor and researcher Isabella Lenzi and Rember Yahuarcani—an artist, writer, curator and the son of Yahuarcani and López—it is the duo’s first solo show outside of Peru. It spans more than two decades of their practice, from rarely seen early paintings and sculptures to recent pieces conceived especially for the show. Rooted in the ancestral traditions of the Uitoto, Tikuna and Cocama people, Somos raices, which translates to ‘we are roots’ in Spanish, encompasses a spiritual and political repository. “[The exhibition] highlights how Yahuarcani and López reinterpret and renew what they have inherited—myths, cosmologies, materials and techniques—into a living practice that speaks from and to the present,” Lenzi said in a conversation with STIR. “Their work becomes a space of reactivation and reimagination, where memory is not static but a tool of resistance and creative possibility,” the curator added.

Yahuarcani, a painter and sculptor from the White Heron clan of the Uitoto nation, and López, a sculptor of Tikuna and Cocama descent, both live and work in the Peruvian Amazon, in the district of Pebas, on the banks of the Ampiyacú River. Both their practices stem from oral history, community ritual and ancestral knowledge; Yahuarcani’s vibrant mythological scenes and López’s intricate sculptural art confront the legacy of the centuries of extractivism that shaped Amazonian communities. The 19th-century Amazon rubber boom, a pivotal period in Brazil's socioeconomic history and the Amazonian regions, involved the commercialisation of rubber to satisfy increasing European and North American demand. This era resulted in severe ecological damage and the genocide of indigenous populations. In Somos raíces, these themes amalgamate into an impactful testament to resistance and regeneration.

Yahuarcani’s paintings, created using natural dyes on llanchama, a vegetal fabric made from the inner bark of a native plant, renaco, reveal mythological and historical narratives through vivid, intricately layered compositions. The Man with the Heart of Stone: The Rubber Boom in the Amazon in the 20th Century (2017) recalls the brutal legacy of the rubber boom with symbolic force, depicting spectral figures and fragmented bodies that echo collective trauma. In a composition exuding chaos, a fire appears to engulf the Amazon and its Indigenous peoples while colonisers dig, demolish and raze the lands for resources.

Buinaiño, dueña del mijano (2025), interweaves cosmology with ecological insight in a panoramic format. A colossal machine with humanoid limbs devours humans in the painting, while countless fish occupy the scene, falling from the sky and entering the machine. Across his paintings, he uses rich pigments derived from earth, fruits and roots.

López’s sculptural practice takes cues from ancestral materials and visions, breathing life into sculptures and masks crafted using seeds, roots, fibres and bark. The process of gathering materials is often guided by dreams, or the granting of ‘permission’ of the plants themselves. The sculptor’s piece Espíritu de Ajosacha (2024), made from tree bark, liana fibre and natural dyes, invokes plant-spirit beings as protectors. Ajo Sacha, a woody vine native to the Amazon basin, is envisioned as a hybrid entity with arboreal and human features. “The materials used by Yahuarcani and López are not just media—they are agents of memory, ecology and spirit… This ecological intimacy contrasts sharply with extractivist logics, positioning their art as a form of resistance and caretaking,” Lenzi explained.

At the heart of Somos raíces is an intergenerational knowledge transfer, not as inheritance but as shared gestures and labour. In Yahuarcani and López’s world, art is never solitary—it emerges from conversations with elders, teachings from parents and grandparents, and the curious hands of children learning by doing. A film included in the exhibition shows Yahuarcani painting with his grandchildren, while López sculpts alongside her daughter. These moments mark the continuations of a living practice, where memory is not bounded in archives but channelled into fibres, pigments and the spirit of collective creation. “The materials themselves embody the tension between continuity and loss: while they invoke ancestral presence, they also speak to the fragility of the ecosystems that sustain them, threatened by deforestation, pollution and violence,” Lenzi noted. 

By centring indigenous authorship within a major European institution, the curators challenge dominant narratives in contemporary art. The show affirms Yahuarcani and López’s work not as mere subjects but as active participants in shaping narratives.

Somos raíces invites viewers to reconsider how we relate to memory, land and to each other. In a context where memory is systemically threatened, and ecological collapse and cultural fragmentation loom, the exhibition offers a critique of extractive histories and the colonial silencing of Indigenous people in the Amazon. Furthermore, it suggests that art, rooted in ancestral knowledge, intergenerational care and ecological sensitivity, has the potential to reimagine and catalyse shifts in the status quo. In doing so, Somos raíces becomes both a call and a commitment to re-root ourselves in shared, interdependent futures.

‘Somos raices’ is on view from June 13 – September 14, 2025, at Círculo de Bellas de Artes in Madrid, Spain.