BY [STEVE DREVET]
The Island of Shamans
Steve Drevet and Claude Parent-Saura
Discovered in 1946 by the Franco-Dutch explorer Cleeve Sutherland, the Island of Shamans is a land shrouded in mystery, located somewhere in the Atlantic Ocean. It is home to “those who heal the world.” From across four continents, sorcerers, healers and magicians, as they are sometimes called, have taken refuge on this small island to ensure the survival of their ancestral beliefs and pass on their knowledge, fleeing the modern world they call “the devourer of peoples.”
In 2010, photographer Steve Drevet and visual artist Claude Parent-Saura discovered the travel journals of explorer Cleeve Sutherland, then ninety years old. After a long correspondence, they eventually met the old man. Subject to trances that his doctors associated with dementia, he was living in a psychiatric institution in Amsterdam.
Cleeve Sutherland shared with them his ethnological discoveries concerning the island, whose location he had always refused to reveal. His final wishes were clear: he wanted to entrust his two friends with the visions he had experienced on the Island of Shamans.
Guided by the explorer’s trances and memories, Steve Drevet and Claude Parent-Saura set out to reconstruct the strange world of the island, giving flesh and substance to its shamans, whose masks endow them with extraordinary powers. From this allegorical journey emerged a narrative poised between two worlds. The photographs, born from the overlapping perspectives of the visual artist and the photographer, are accompanied by a travel journal compiled and reworked by Steve Drevet from fragments of the sometimes obscure notes left behind by Sutherland himself.
Cleeve Sutherland would write, shortly before his death, which occurred a few months after his last spiritual journey:
“The island of the shamans is inhabited by guardians of the Earth’s memory who perpetuate the founding myths of our planet in the greatest secrecy. May it always remain so! These natives of Arizona, Mexico, Haiti, Europe, Asia, and elsewhere are the heirs of civilizations that have almost disappeared. They left their lands; they fled materialist and globalist voracity in order to safeguard their ancestral beliefs on this island. They live side by side with a common purpose: to preserve the heritage of their world, but also of ours. My curiosity as a Western scholar cost me my sanity, isolation, and poverty, but in return I gained the supreme knowledge of an otherworld... a realm where spirituality has its full place, and which I shall soon join. Today, on these quiet shores, I am no longer afraid.”
 “The woman who carries Time in her womb fertilizes the river. With her staff, crowned with seahorse-like branches, she strikes the underwater rocks… |  …the river, in return, answers her with songs heard by the sorcerers in their scale-covered masks. It is the whisper of the water, speaking of the past, the present, the future. At times, it becomes a roar, carried by the waterfalls, announcing life, death… |  …the shaman wearing the turtle mask, who also serves as an oracle, listens to the murmur of the waters and translates the song of the world.” |
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