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Sheroanawe Hakihiiwe was born in 1971 in the small village of Sheroana, near the headwaters of the Orinoco River, deep into the Amazon forest. He is an indigenous artist currently based in Mahekoto-Teri (Platanal), a Yanomami community in the Venezuelan Amazon.

Before he began to practice art, Sheroanawe acquired valuable knowledge that allows him to survive and lead a life like any other Yanomami man: hunting, making bows and arrows, fishing, recognizing the different types of plants and animals that are useful to them, stories and tales from the oral tradition, among other activities of their culture and environment. During those years, he grew up together with other children from the community, participating in festivities and initiation rites typical of their village.

Years later, Sheroanawe enters the educational system of the Multicultural Bilingual School of Platanal, under the direction of Salesian priest Father José Bortolli at that time, where he learns to read and write in Spanish. In 1990, he crossed paths with Mexican artist Laura Anderson Barbata on a trip she made to the Upper Orinoco, where she started a training project for making handicraft paper in the community of Platanal.

During the early nineties, Sheroanawe learned how to make handmade paper from natural fibers and became a master papermaker. He researched plant fibers from the area that were useful for papermaking along with Anderson. The two founded the Yanomami Owë Mamotima project [The Yanomami Art of Papermaking] around 1996. In its beginnings, a large group of members of the community focused on the production of books, notebooks, and cards for internal use and commercialization. The Yanomami Owë Mamotima group then took on the task of compiling the story of the mythical twins Omawe and Yoawe² —as narrated by Shaman Makowe— who, through their experiences, taught the Yanomami people the art of building the community house: the shapono.

In 2004, Laura Anderson and Sheroanawe were invited to participate in the Fundación La Llama residency program in Caracas. There, for two months, they transcribed the notes they had collected for almost a decade in Upper Orinoco, basing their research on field data and books and documents from the collection of the library of the Botanical Garden of Caracas.

Sheroanawe then returns to Upper Orinoco, where he sits for long days to perform a self-imposed task: to compile from his mother the extensive inventory of symbols and drawings, traditionally used by women in baskets and by the community in general in body painting. This work aimed at the difficult task of retrieving part of the oral, graphic, cosmogonic, and traditional memory of their people. From this experience, Hakihiiwe begins to develop a language of his own, characterized by synthetic and minimal drawing.

His entire work revolves around the intense relationship he has with the jungle he inhabits. These bonds in his work are communicating vessels that extend across the realms of the personal and the collective. His work is, thus, a contemporary revision of the cosmogony, the natural imaginary, and the social and cultural environment of the Yanomami people.

Sheroanawe's art is a tremendous living archive of a memory preserved and stimulated by his artistic, aesthetic, and rational curiosity. His drawings and paintings are posed as a link that binds the ancestral with the contemporary, existing between two or more universes, and simultaneously traveling across several times.

From a blunt silence, his work invites us to reflect on the imbalances that take place in cultural hegemony. I always think of the great challenge implied for Sheroanawe in having to speak and translate from Spanish into his language a series of concepts and ideas which are not familiar and have no parallel in his language.

Many events are planned from a logic that is foreign to him, and this is a learning or challenge for him. I remember the first time I told him, back in 2010, that we were going to make an exhibition with his drawings. He did not understand it because the concept was not familiar to him. When he saw all the drawings installed in the gallery, hanging on the wall, he said to me, "Oh, so this is an exhibition! Then it shall be called: Oni tepe komi” [All the drawings are here together].”