CULTURE SCULPTURE

PRESERVING IMAGES OF THREATENED AMAZONIAN TRIBES

Thanks to the works of a Peruvian artist, ancient tribes will be remembered long
after they are gone.

Felipe Lettersten nimbly alights from the boat which has ferried him to the
shores of the Marubo village on the Itui River, a tributary of the Amazon in
Brazil. He greets the curious tribespeople clustered on the edge of the
riverbank with the familiarity of a small-town mayor, overcoming their natural
suspicions of the white man with his guileless warmth.

The Peruvian-born Swedish sculptor tells the tribe elders he has journeyed
hundreds of miles to honor them by creating lifesized statues of them that will
endure long after the tribe is extinct. He shows them statues of other tribes
he has completed to reassure the natives-most of whom are reluctant to even be
photographed-that he means them no harm.

It is a scene that has been repeated dozens of times over the past six years in
remote Amazon Valley settlements, located with the help of local
anthropologists. Lettersten is on a personal crusade to preserve the
centuries-old cultures of the Americas' indigenous peoples.

The compactly built sculptor and his ten-person crew have traveled thousands of
miles throughout the Amazon basin on their dilapidated, double-decker, wooden
river boat, a sort of floating studio. Lettersten bought the boat in 1988 for
$16,000 and dubbed it Inca Pachacutec, for the fabled Inca king who ruled the
Andes at the height of the Inca Empire.

Funded largely out of his own pocket (he even sold his farm near Lima, Peru, to
pay for his expeditions), Lettersten has created likenesses of 137 Indians from
more than 60 tribes throughout the Americas, primarily in Peru and Brazil. But
until recently, his Indiana Jones-style cultural safaris were dismissed as the
pipe dream of an eccentric artist. This is no longer the case. With the
celebration of the five-hundreth anniversary of Columbus' arrival in the
Americas, the 36-year-old sculptor and his "Sons of Our Land" project has become
a Latin American sensation.

Three major exhibitions of his work drew nearly half a million visitors to Lima
in the late 1980s. Currently, two dozen of his statues are featured at Eco '90,
the international ecological fair in Rio De Janeiro, and a smaller collection is
touring the United States. "Felipe is a good artist," says Arturo Jimenez
Borja, president of the National Museum of Peru. "But beyond the art itself,
his obvious love for the indigenous culture is what is so appealing."

Significantly, 22 of Lettersten's homages to the continent's native tribes are
the centerpiece of the America's Pavilion at Expo '92 in Seville, Spain,
Columbus' debarkation point to the New World. "In the five hundred years since,
we've killed seventy million Indians and made them the poorest people on the
continent," says Lettersten, gesturing with strong, weathered hands. "Columbus
is dead-he doesn't need a monument. But the Indians deserve one."

His concern for the plight of primitive peoples borders on passion. "The
descendants of the Spanish settlers were taught to despise the Indians," says
the artist, himself the son of Swedish industrialists who emigrated to Peru.
"But my family admired them. I grew up around them and learned to love them."

Lettersten seems driven to keep some vestige of their dying traditions intact.
The artist's elfin face, surrounded by a halo of blonde ringlettes, glows with
pleasure as he deftly splatters plaster of Paris on the model he has chosen to
represent the Marubo tribe. She is an 18-year-old girl who patiently stands
holding a large jug over her shoulder. She is encased while the plaster
hardens. (Lettersten threaded strings around her body before applying the
plaster to make it easier to remove.) After about ten minutes, the girl is
freed, section by section, along the lines formed by the string. The mold will
later be reassembled by Lettersten and his assistants in his cavernous Lima
studio. There they will construct the statue out of plaster and coat it with a
bronze-like finish. "The memory of her comes alive in my house," says
Lettersten.

Eventually Lettersten, who is reluctant to sell the statues because he believes
it would be a sacrilege to profit from them, would like to travel to Asia,
Africa, and the South Pacific to immortalize vanishing tribes living in those
regions. "It is a great gift to be able to create something that is eternal,"
says Lettersten. "This is what I plan to do for the rest of my life."