The exhibition "Wayamou: Lenguas de lo común" at the Museo Tamayo in Mexico City presents the collaborative work of artists Laura Anderson Barbata and Sheroanawe Hakihiiwe, whose artistic and political relationship spans over three decades. The show traces their shared history, beginning in the early 1990s when Barbata traveled to the Venezuelan Amazon and taught handmade papermaking using local plant fibers, introducing Hakihiiwe to a sustained visual exploration of Yanomami cosmology, oral tradition, and legacy. In 1992, they co-founded Yanomami Owë Mamotima ("Yanomami art of papermaking"), a project enabling the community to tell its own stories through its own visual and linguistic codes, exemplified by the handmade book "Shapono (Casa)" (1996).
The exhibition matters because it challenges Western contemporary art's tendency to reduce Indigenous practices to categories like "nature" or "spirituality." Instead, it proposes a "politics of listening," using the Yanomami concept of wayamou—a ceremonial dialogue for resolving conflicts and preserving peace—as both a curatorial concept and an ethical model. By installing a temporality of pause and attention, the show resists the accelerated image circulation of contemporary art, foregrounding horizontal exchange, collective production, and self-representation over extractive or anthropological mediation.