Cartographies of The Unseen

This is a practice-based artistic research project that investigates modes of territorial thinking from the Global South. Combining artist’s films and participatory research, it seeks to reveal the landscape as a system of life-enabling relations through obscured layers of occupation and governance above, across, and below the ground. Therefore, a central case study is a contested Indigenous territory in the Southwest of Colombian, in a highly diverse ecoregion that acts as a transition zone between the Andes and the Amazon.

 For centuries this area has been the epicenter of ecological and epistemic violence, enacted along the vertical axis connecting visible and subvisible layers, as well as altitudes throughout the landscape. Therefore, the project unfolds as an exploration of this vertical axis of biocultural relations, revealing clashing historical, political, and aesthetic trajectories of space cognition.

Drawing upon Indigenous territorial thinking and aesthetics from the Southwest of Colombia, particularly among the Inga, Kamnesta, Quillacinga, and Siona communities, and using participatory methods, this practice-based research aims to formulate: 1) an inter-epistemic dialogue around notions of territoriality; 2) support the co-presence of Indigenous aesthetics in the global spheres of knowledge and cultural production; 3) and finally to co-create immersive experiences which can contribute to recalibrate western approaches to territorial thinking, spatial aesthetics, and modes of belonging to the planet.