Ti'iwan Couchili

Ti’iwan Couchili is an Indigenous artivist from French Guiana.
She began her career in the early 1990s by creating “maluwana” (known as “huts in the sky”), allegorical paintings that are a particularly integral part of Wayana spiritual culture. In doing so, she deliberately violated the prohibition that, in principle, had been imposed on women in relation to this highly codified traditional art form. Encouraged by the undisputed master of the genre, KULIYAMAN (who died in 2001), she profoundly reinterprets this practice by renewing its bestiary and incorporating numerous motifs drawn from the rich iconographic repertoire of southern French Guiana: face and body painting, beadwork, basketry, and pottery.
While retaining the techniques (painting on wood using laterite and clay) and characteristics (a balance between the symbolic and the figurative) of “maluwana,” his work has been shifting over the past fifteen years or so toward a self-proclaimed form of “artivism.” Pollution, deforestation, climate change, and the social unrest affecting the indigenous communities of French Guiana are recurring themes in his work.

Didier MAUREL