GGIS Colloquium | Where Thought and Place Are One: Yakui Yachana and the Art of Mapping With Amazonian Places

Where Thought and Place Are One: Yakui Yachana and the Art of Mapping With Amazonian Places
Alli puncha, causanguichu. Are you with life, are you living? This talk shares Yakui Yachana, a multi-year collaborative mapping project with Napo Runa peoples of the Ecuadorian Amazon. Part art exhibit, part storytelling, part method for grounded normativity, we ask what becomes possible when we "amazonize" cartography — mapping with, rather than about, Amazonian places. 

Drawing on participatory workshops with the community of Nuevo Santo Domingo del Río Hollín, we follow hand-drawn maps that hold rivers, forests, and spirits as kin rather than coordinates: maps where vanishing points open onto myth-time, where lines carry ayllu and llacta, or a sense of home, and where being known by a place matters as much as knowing it. We ask not what these drawings show, but where they lead us — and what it might mean to map otherwise, on Amazonian peoples' own terms.