Artists have always been fascinated with imagining the invisible – but few have taken it quite as far as Musuk Nolte. The 37-year-old Mexican photographer has spent a decade working with the Indigenous peoples of the Peruvian Amazon region – and found inspiration there by taking ayahuasca with a shaman called Julio.
Nolte tells me he first took ayahuasca when he was five years old – with his mum, an anthropologist who studied the psychedelic brew. The powerful hallucinogenic visions he experienced while with the Shawi community in their ancestral homeland, the Paranapura basin, have been translated into a series of images titled The Belongings of the Air, presented as small suspended light boxes, glowing like fireflies in a darkened room. They are unconventional documents, not showing the Shawi directly but reflecting the Shawi cosmovision. Pulsating with flashes of bright white light, the images have an allegorical tenor: we move with quickened breath from the intimate to the epic, from a woman and child washing clothes in a river to a closeup of a man’s ear, to the blazing eyes of a big cat, to a dazzling constellation of blurry silver flecks. This latter image was created by photographing rows of candles lit for forcibly displaced relatives whose whereabouts remain unknown. The feeling it stirs is one of the universe melting.
