Ayênan

A film by Felipe Castelblanco and Lydia Zimmermann, 2020

‘Ayenan’ is the smallest particle in the universe that jumpstarts life.

This film documents a counter-expedition that follows the upward movement of water throughout its natural cycle, going from the Andean-Amazon foothills to the Atlantic Ocean on the coast of Colombia. Along the way, the journey reveals the traces of a long-forgotten expedition in search of El Dorado and the territorial philosophy of Indigenous groups from the region. Climbing up from a river in the lower Amazon to a lake in the upper Andes, members of Ñambi Rimai Media Collective come to a sacred landscape in order to plant water back into the mountain and return a long-lost treasure. Together they create an offering, a ritual, which embodies situated forms of biocultural peace-building between regions, cultures, and non-human worlds.

Directors Bio

FELIPE CASTELBLANCO is a multidisciplinary artist working at the intersection of socially engaged and Media Art. His work creates platforms for inter-epistemic dialogue and ventures out into new frontiers of publicness. Recent shows include the 2019 Quebec Biennial, Seasons of Media at ZKM in Karlsruhe and the Queens Museum in New York, among others. Felipe holds an MFA from Carnegie Mellon University (USA) and is currently completing a PhD at the ECAM Graduate School at the HGK Basel and University of the Arts, Linz. His doctoral project titled Cartographies of the Unseen explores avenues for biocultural peace-building and territorial rights in the Colombian Pan-Amazon region. 

LYDIA ZIMMERMANN has directed fiction films, TV movies, film essays, and documentaries since 1994. She has filmed in Switzerland, Spain, Australia, Mexico, Haiti, Burkina Faso, and Colombia, exploring cinematic genres, non-linear narratives, and expanded cinema. She holds a MA in Transdisciplinary Studies from the ZHdK and is the founder of Kunstruktur, a south/north platform for artistic research and human kindness. Currently, she lives between Barcelona and Zurich developing film projects for Artisan Films (Switzerland), Principal Films (Spain), and Ralda World (Catalonia).