Bruce Albert et Davi Kopenawa, Yanomami, l’esprit de la forêt

Since 2003, Fondation Cartier has developed a fruitful partnership with Bruce Albert, French anthropologist and undisputed specialist of the Yanomami, and Davi Kopenawa, “Alternative Nobel Prize” in 2019, one of the most respected shamans of this people inhabiting a vast forest territory in northwestern Brazil. Together they wrote La Chute du ciel, published by Plon. After nearly fifty years of friendship, they share again their voices, their views and their sensibilities along with those of artists and scientists about the Yanomami world: animals and plants of the Amazonian Forest, representations of the Yanomami cosmology and shamanic images. A rich and subtle universe disrupted by the violent encounter with the white settlers, the gold rush, epidemics and the political challenges of the past decades.

Co-published with Actes Sud, this book gathers in seventeen chapters the writings of Bruce Albert and Davi Kopenawa, tracing this history and the intellectual and aesthetic exchanges between the authors and the artists presented at the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain. These texts evoke the shamanic perspective of the Yanomami, the images and sounds of the Amazonian Forest, the complexity of its biodiversity and the threat of its destruction.