Pervading the entirety of Flores’s oeuvre are intricate, undulating, balanced lines known as Kené, which function as visual representations of the pathways of Shipibo-Konibo knowledge of the cosmos, as well as vast riverine networks of the Amazon. All Shipibo village and ceremonial life along with their ancestral histories are, as the network shows, connected to the great river. The artist describes Kené designs as ‘the visual manifesto of our [Shipibo-Konibo] rules of coexistence in reciprocity. It is a reminder that, both in our community and in nature, we are all interconnected.’¹ In ‘Bakish Mai’, Flores’s work commands a ceremonial space that invites the viewer to experience her unique incarnation of the Shipibo world of Kené – to participate, metaphorically, within Flores’s reimagined Amazonian community.

The term Amazon refers both to the rainforest and the river system in South America, whose many tributaries carry one-fifth of the Earth’s flowing freshwater. It is the world’s largest and most biodiverse tropical rainforest – producing 20 percent of the planet’s oxygen. The Amazon is home to the Shipibo-Konibo peoples, the second largest Indigenous group in this region of Peru. They stand as guardians, protectors and stewards of this vast sacred rainforest, the home of ancient wisdoms. Today, there are over 35,000 Shipibo-Konibo,² living primarily in village communities along the Ucayali River and its smaller tributaries, such as the Pisqui, where homes are built on stilts to accommodate the rivers’ natural ebb and flow. Flores chooses to make her studio and home in the jungle, near the lake and village of Yarinacocha, Peru. There, Shipibo community and culture remain strong, upheld through collective activity and tradition.

Conversations with Flores reveal a sadness at the difficulties confronting the Shipibo peoples today, as they struggle to protect, manage and care for their lands. Those residing in riverine villages within the Amazon forest are increasingly under threat and must defend their leaders and their territories against illegal logging, oil spills, drug trafficking and environmental degradation through the exploitation of unregulated corporate actors.³

Flores’s first film work, Non Nete (A flag for the Shipibo Nation), bears witness to the strength and resilience of the Shipibo-Konibo community. The film features a flag with Kené designs, stirred by the pulsing breath of the wind, a soft melody blown into an ayahuasca bottle to propitiate a shamanic journey. Wind, breath, flag and Kené all move rhythmically together in space. This fused movement refers to the unity and aliveness of the Shipibo Nation, as wind and breath metaphorically call forth the idea of the Amazon forest as our Earth’s lungs, with the flag foregrounding the Shipibo-Konibo as its guardians. Claiming Indigenous power and sovereignty in their Amazonian homelands, the film is a call to bring the Shipibo-Konibo People together for their ongoing struggles and for their role as protectors of both forest and culture.

Kené, an abstract design intrinsic to Shipibo cosmology, reflects an essential closeness to the plant world of the forests. It makes visible the pathways along which Shipibo ‘knowledge, objects and power’ travel,⁴ and can be understood as a visual representation of the flow of cultural and natural knowledge – routes through which people, communication and wisdom move. These are also pathways of the macrocosmic and microcosmic: the great arc of the Milky Way above, and the earthly paths of human, plants and vines below. Kené reveals the sap or energy of the forests flowing within human veins and metaphorically marks the routes of the ever-evolving Amazon River.⁵ Within the community, these designs are understood to hold healing properties and to embody a unique expression of Shipibo-Konibo contemporary identity and ancestral memory. Likewise, in Flores’s paintings, these cosmic and earthly trajectories are entwined – their labyrinthine diagrams speaking of an interconnectedness between universe, human life and organic matter.

Trained by her mother – in the Shipibo tradition of matrilineal succession – to see the invisible world of Kené, Flores paints her visions without drafts or preparatory sketches. Such designs are dreamed by women and shamans and painted and stitched solely by women. Flores’s paintings allow us to share in this vision of the Shipibo’s cosmic world, one in which ancestral histories and the pathways of Ronin, the great anaconda, are summoned from an unseen realm. It is said that Ronin, the primordial serpent, reveals the pathways of the river. The twisted form of the ayahuasca vine – a most important medicinal plant used by shamans – itself recalls the great anaconda Ronin, who is also referred to as the ‘mother of ayahuasca’ and ‘the aquatic source of all designs.’⁶

Stepping away from a sole focus on the linear, abstract world of Kené, Flores’s paintings in this exhibition incorporate detailed renderings of leaves sprouting from Kené’s cosmic pathways. With these, Flores demonstrates once again her unparalleled ability to push the medium forward in inventive ways. Not only this, she also seems to ask us to remain alert and present – to attend to this almost magical, brilliant green leaf, which illuminates the plant’s agency and emanates a creative energy in rhythm with the Earth. Is this young green sprout – Flores’s gift to us – an instance of the microcosm made visible? The veins of these tender green sproutings may be imagined as ‘the pathways that better transmit the rao – plants […] as intelligent beings par excellence.’⁷ The term rao not only refers to the power of plant-teachers in healing, but also encompasses the properties of Amazonian flora more broadly – including the ability to induce altered states of consciousness, act as poisons for fishing or hunting, or guide and influence human behaviour.⁸

Rao resides not only in the abstract patterns of Kené designs but also in Flores’s careful selection of plant materials by which she creates her ‘Pei Kené’ series. Her materials include wild cotton – gathered for the woven, unprimed canvas – and yellow, red, and black paints made from tree bark, riverbed mud and plants prepared by Flores’s family and community members. Red comes from the achiote fruit, yellow from turmeric, and for the complex black dye, Flores explains: ‘we must go to the forest to get the bark of the yacoshapana’,⁹ which is boiled to produce the black pigment. Dark riverbed mud is then applied to the black paint as an alkaline mordant to set and deepen the black colour. All sourced from the nearby jungles – the cotton purchased from a community vendor – community engagement is essential to the gathering and production of these materials. Like Kené, this collective process shows that the Shipibo-Konibo principle of reciprocity is central to its aesthetics. Minga – the sharing of labour, the act of giving and receiving – is, above all, a practice that strengthens community and acknowledges the interdependence of all living things. And it is through minga that Flores animates and brings forth the regenerative power of her Kené vision.

Contemporary art offers channels through which artists like Flores articulate new ways of comprehending the world. Flores calls us to think beyond Western aesthetics and its human-centred paradigm involving a hierarchical relationship to plants and the non-human world. What emerges is an expanded aesthetics of living: one grounded in interconnectedness, in communion with nature, journeying together in a time-space continuum along the pathways of the great cosmic serpent. Flores invites us to engage with openness in the process of minga, to encounter the visions of Kené and sense its beauty, strength, abundance and fragility, and the possibility of living in an alternative mode of reality. Her ‘Pei Kené’ series offers a portal into the living world of the invisible.