The face of the shamaness: discovering the nembori, the ancient ritual masks
A journey into the heart of one of the world's most dangerous places, the Darién rainforest, between Panama and Colombia. Here Corinne Bally works with Emberà women who weave the chunga palm and the nahuala.
7' min read
7' min read
From the most dangerous place on the planet, the Darién rainforest on the border between Panama and Colombia, to the largest interior design fair in Paris. For more than ten years, Corinne Bally, 58, French by birth and Spanish by adoption, has been working with the indigenous women of the Emberà tribe, among the most isolated on Earth, in Central America. Together they make tribal masks called in the local dialect nemboro (meaning 'head') with great symbolic and anthropological significance. Originally, these artefacts represented, along with herbal potions, chants and litanies, the tools of the trade of the local shamans, still present in the community today. Today they are works of art, decorative elements exhibited in concept stores, libraries and, recently, at Maison&Objet.
"Wearing one of these masks, the shaman, part healer and part psychologist, is able to communicate with the invisible world, to get in touch with the evil spirit that torments sick people, who turn to him for help," says Corinne Bally. Before her first trip to Panama, inspired by the book Panamá split by Ernesto Endara, she had already lived two professional lives, as the director of a European Community programme ("I worked with small bakers, against the competition of industrialisation") and as a gallery owner in Valencia where her showroom Ethic & Tropic is based. Here today, in the shop window, are the woven masks that, without her curiosity and tenacity, would not exist: they are born to be destroyed, at the end of each shamanic ritual they end up in a big bonfire.
"The first time I saw these masks woven from dried leaves was at the old Panama City market. They impressed me so much that I decided to go to the place where they were made to learn about their origin. Acquaintances and friends discouraged me: I was a 50-pound, 50-year-old foreigner who wanted to go to what everyone called the jungle of death, a forbidden as well as dangerous place. I got on a bus without really knowing how I would proceed. Along the way, peasants in work clothes, mothers with children, street vendors, and at one stop even an evangelical preacher who, despite the potholes in the road, stood for the whole of his journey to warn us of God's wrath, got on board. I had an appointment with Danitza, an Indian woman who had been introduced to me by an acquaintance; she lived between Panama City and the jungle. She would be my intermediary with the artisans of the forest. She could have been the right person (although a year later, she turned out to be the exact opposite and stole a lot of money), but on my first journey into the unknown, she was the only reference I had. The agreement was that he would pick me up at the bus stop on the way to Puerto Lara, a village of his tribe, which in the dry season can be reached by road and river. I got off at the agreed point, but there was no one waiting for me. Impossible to phone her, because she obviously had no mobile phone. All I could do was stand there on the side of a deserted road at the edge of the jungle and wait. After more than an hour, which seemed endless, she arrived and took me to meet the Emberà artisans up close.
Since then Corinne has returned some thirty times ('organising myself, because the intermediaries turned out to be swindlers'). A trip every three months, the first leg in a pickup driven by Jesus, a trusted driver, and then in a motorised pirogue carved out of a tree trunk. The only way of communication, the river. "We set sail at dawn from Yaviza, the pueblo where the road ends and the forest begins, to avoid being caught in the dark in this area known as the Darién Gap, where the Pan-American Highway that connects Alaska to Patagonia for 30 thousand kilometres only breaks for 100 kilometres, in an inaccessible and dangerous section. Because of the presence of crocodiles, poisonous snakes, unhealthy areas that are hotbeds of disease and the largest cocaine traffic from Colombia'.
The first village is four interminable hours away, also because we often stop because of oppressive heat or tropical storms (the rainy season runs from the end of April to the end of December). "My luggage never lacks a mosquito net, hammock, sleeping bag, boots and waterproof bags to protect my masks on the return journey. I try to cover myself as much as possible to avoid mosquito bites and especially morongolls, tiny insects that also sneak in under my clothes. The precautions are quite useless: I always return with bite marks that remain with me for several months'.
