Entwining chambira to weave a world-forest
The project develops an open archive alongside the Tepapare community composed of drawings, maps, photographs, video footage, audio recordings, oral histories, and traditional songs. Together they document the entangled territorial and cosmological assemblages present in complex production processes. The research focuses on the socio-ecological processes in making the traditional Yoo, the Waorani hammocks. Yoo's production involves intense trekking through the forest and gathering source materials throughout vast portions of the group's traditional territory. While chanting songs that recall the human-other-than-human relations embodied in the materials, the Tepapare women collectively weave together memory, place, and matter, inscribing their sense of continuous bodily reciprocity with the Amazon. The resulting artifact is an archival assemblage, a counter-map that makes Waorani ontology and territorial occupation legible, despite attempts at erasure through colonization.
Research supported by Yale’s Tropical Resources Institute Fellowship
Summer 2022
