On the occasion of the first Bienal Internacional De Arte Amazónico the Shipibo Conibo Center invited hip-hop artist Wihtner FaGo to reinterpret the Purga manifesto as a Shipibo rap rhyme. Featuring El Ninio and Yankung and produced by the Center, the song premiered at the biennale as a live performance exposing the looming threat brought to the Ucayali region by the Peruvian state, along with Petroperu and international oil companies pushing through the legitimization of fossil fuel extraction at Lote 200.

 

As the audience watched, fifteen volunteers took center stage to initiate a cleansing underneath the tallest lupuna of Pucallpa, tree thought to be a plant-teacher with medicinal and spiritual attributes but also charged with historical traumas for having been used as site for summary executions. Within half an hour, the participants begun to throw up into the buckets provided, one after another, as microphones equipped the musicians with the opportunity to live sampling their visceral sounds and rap them over.

 

Wihtner FaGo (Erick Wihtner Fasabi Gonzales), El Ninio (Pedro Pablo Salas Asca) and Yankung (Daniel Yankung Tuesta Leyton) are Amazonian hip-hop artists whose work addresses environmental issues and denunciation through artistic activism.