INDIOS

Southern and Central America have been lands of marvellous civilizations: Maya, Aztecs, Incas…

Extraordinary peoples capable to build pyramids like those of the Egyptians, with complex mathematic calculations; peoples with a fascinating mythology, constituted of a pantheon of divinities linked to the earth and universe, to the sun, nature and its mysteries.

They lived of agriculture and sheep-breeding, they inhabited in simple huts, simple as their spirits.

They considered trees and forests as something of sacred…

Maybe a sort of earthly paradise, an Eden, until when the Spanish conquistadores reached their lands by the ocean.

The indigenous thought that the Spanish were a kind of half-divinities: their ships and vessels were completely unknown to the eyes of these populations, like their horses, armours, cannons and harquebus.

They had to realize soon instead how much evil, violent and eager were the newcomers: the Spanish committed a genocide, killing, raping, ravaging and destroying entire villages, profiting of the ingenuity and goodness of the indigenous, just to extend their dominion in the Latin America.

These incredible civilizations knew an authentic, tragic, and inexorable decline.

The invaders behaved as piranhas, the terrible fishes of the Amazon River.

The indigenous tried to face the Spanish, like the Aztecs which opposed them as an extreme defence even a puma, a sacred animal of the civilization of the Pre-Colombian America.

Walter Storri

translator: Luca Pulitini

oil on canvas 50x70 (2003)