Sensing Shipibo Aesthetics Beyond the Peruvian Amazon: Kené Design in Icaros: A Vision (2016)

This essay considers how Indigenous Amazonian aesthetics can sense and be sensed when incorporated into film. Drawing on Amazonian ontology, Shipibo aesthetics, and haptic film theory and focusing on the function of the multimodal Shipibo designs known as kené in Icaros: A Vision (2016, directed by Matteo Norzi and Leonor Caraballo), we propose that the full-length feature film format allows for a sensory experience of kené as life forms emanating from the forest. Two Italian artists created Icaros: A Vision in collaboration with Shipibo artists and shamans affiliated with Anaconda Cósmica, the Iquitos, Peru-area ayahuasca retreat centre where the movie takes place, and the film candidly reflects on the commodification of Indigenous healing and aesthetics in which it participates. Our analysis centres kené and its Shipibo makers – especially women – and compares the film’s Shipibo aesthetics with the words, sounds, and images from César Calvo’s The Three Halves of Ino Moxo: Teachings of the Wizard of the Upper Amazon (1981) and Werner Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo, both of which the film explicitly references. We argue that, in contrast to those works, Icaros: A Vision’s multisensorial engagement with Shipibo aesthetics intercepts – however imperfectly – the objectifying gaze inherent in the unrestrained partitioning of the forest into natural resources.