In Between Dreams: The Forest Echos the Song of the Burning Anaconda | Tatiana Lopez
Tatiana Lopez is a documentary photographer, visual anthropologist, and artist exploring how themes of memory and place merge with identity. Through her practices, she documents and unveils stories of womanhood, identity, ecology, extractivism, and transgenerational trauma.
Her project ‘In Between Dreams, the Forest Echoes the Song of the Burning Anaconda’ stems from long-term ethnographic research in collaboration with Indigenous Sapara women from the Ecuadorian Amazon.
This research is made tangible with Tatian’s photography and Sapara women’s embroidery.
By embroidering these polaroids, Sapara women become their own storytellers, resignifying their memories and oneiric experiences from a place of autonomy while honouring their spiritual connections that recognise human identity is not outside of nature but rather within it. Photo embroidery becomes a mending ritual
Each stitch is seen as a metaphor for liberation.
The Sapara worldview is shaped by the health of the land and their daily interactions with the various spirits of the jungle through dreams.
To be Sapara means to be a woman or a man from the jungle, the caretaker of the jungle. Naku, ‘the forest,’ is not only a physical place but a living world constituted by many spirit beings, human and non-human. The place is endowed with significance. A destroyed land results in the loss of access to dreamtime, jeopardising the Sapara’s cultural identity.
PAJU means power in the hands to heal or perform a specific activity.
Pajus are knowledge or powers the Sapara possess. This includes understanding the healing properties of plants, rituals, handmade ceramics, harvesting, hunting, fishing, and foraging, as well as planting, cultivating, collecting, and preparing medicines for cleansing or healing.
Pajus are transmitted from one generation to the next, continuing a lineage of knowledge.
KUSMUY means dream
For Sapara people, dreaming is considered a privileged entrance to ancestral knowledge.
The cyanotypes pose a reflection of connectedness and destruction.
Symbolically, the blue color represents the bodily waters, and the red string highlights the ancestral lineage. It is said that when we stop to think about how individual bodies become implicated with other bodies of water, we start moving beyond objectification and towards new imaginaries of living and engaging the land.
Ancestral Sapara teachings of witsa ikichanu, “good living,” mean safeguarding the energy of the river, the forest, and the wind through a harmonious connection to the land and a receptive bond to the spirit world through dreams.
The struggles of Indigenous Sapara people are rooted in the extensive attempts to illegally extract fossil fuels from their territory. Being previously assumed to be extinct, due to the effects of colonialism, the rubber trade, migration, diseases, and enslavement, in 2001 Sapara people were finally recognised by UNESCO as part of the “Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity.”
Today, fewer than 600 Sapara remain, and only three elders speak their native language.
Ñuka ñawita tapani Cierro mis ojos I close my eyes Panga Tukuni Me transformo en hoja I transform myself in a leaf Waira urmachiguan El viento me hace caer The wind makes me fall Allpa shunguluan ullariguan La tierra me abraza con su corazón The Earth hugs me with her heart.
Poem by Mukutsawa Montahuano.
Photography, words and research by Tatiana Lopez. Visit her website and Instagram to explore more of her work.