May 2 – 9, 2024 10:00 – 17:00 p.m.
Audience: Resident artists, alumni, artists more broadly, students, general public
Outreach: 55
The two-day lecture and presentation, aimed to open a space for communication and creation to celebrate and co-create in the wor(l)d, by raising awareness of the colonial aspects that inhabit how we understand different notions of knowledge and how these affect the survival of human groups whose epistemologies do not fall within the Capitalist framework of the mode of production of life. It also looked for establishing communication parameters between experiences lived within the notion of territory, opening the discussion on how territory was lived at a collective level in the participants’ perception.
Taita Hernando Chindoy is an indigenous leader from the Pueblo Inga in Colombia and ex-governor of the Resguardo Indígena Inga de Aponte. His work is focused, among other things, on supporting and encouraging traditional medicine and knowledge and raising awareness of the interconnectedness between human lives and biodiversity. Along with this goes his legacy on manual eradication of illicit cultivars in the Inga territory, and his ongoing advocacy for a deeper and more open approach to the relationship between plants’ intelligence, indigenous autonomy, and legislation.
In collaboration with artist, educator, and independent researcher Milena Bonilla, and with Ana Cristina Rodriguez, mother, planter, and pollinator of the word, Taita Hernando invited participants to embrace, nourish, and pay attention to the form our thoughts manifested in the world. The two-day workshop invited image makers, interpreters, and sharers to connect our wording and imagination with notions of collective action, territory, and cultural healing.
We touched upon, among other things, individual and collective experiences with concepts of territory and Buen Vivir, as well as community-nature connections within expanded organisms.
Joining Hernando Chindoy and Milena Bonilla was artist and activist Ana Cristina Rodriguez Muñoz. She was currently researching collective ways of disseminating knowledge in indigenous communities, engaging plant medicine, mothering, ancestral knowledge, and feminist collective practices. This was part of the project for the building of Ecöonera, the Indigenous Pluriversity. Ana Cristina led an initial ceremony or ‘ofrenda’ (gift) to the land.
Given that it was originally planned as an online event, if permission is given by our speakers and workshop participants, we will make a recording of parts of the event and make it accessible online so that it can reach a wider audience. Because of the nature of this being a workshop it is not something that we can ask in advance, but it is our intention to do so.
About the organizers:
Hernando Chindoy is a guest tutor at Sandberg Instituut (Amsterdam), and Ph.D. Honoris Causa from London University of the Arts. He holds several recognitions for his labour as a social leader, among which stand out the Equator Prize 2015 (PNUD) for his work ‘Wuasikamas-El modelo del Pueblo Inga en Aponte‘, the title of Experto en Pueblos Indígenas, Derechos Humanos and Cooperación Internacional from the Universidad Carlos III. From 2017 to 2022, Hernando spearheaded the creation of the National Organization AWAI of the Inga Indigenous people in Colombia, during which time he also contributed to the creation of the Inga Panamazonic Biocultural Pluriversity AWAI.
Milena Bonilla is a visual artist, educator and independent researcher, born in Bogotá, living and working in Amsterdam. Her artistic practice is currently invested in epistemic colonialism and the different ways in which its historical background and current structures affect organisms, language, imagery, social orders and the perception of history itself. Bonilla is also interested in information, practices and knowledge that propose and place particular questions about language and agency as ontological properties of humans only, and how this precept is embedded in the way in which economic policies under capitalism operate.
Her work has been shown, screened and performed in the last years among others at Galeria Municipal do Porto; Nest, The Hague; Framer Framed, Amsterdam; A Tale of a Tub, Rotterdam; Museo del Oro Quimbaya, Armenia, Quindío (CO); MHKA, Antwerp; MACRO Museum, Rome; the European Social Science History Conference (ESSHC), Amsterdam; Konsthall C, Stockholm; Temporary Gallery, Cologne; MOCO, Montpellier; and The Mistake Room in Los Angeles.
Ana Cristina Rodriguez Muñoz – Mother, seeder and pollinator of the word for life. Colombian. Guardian of Wuasikamas territory, engaging plant medicine, mothering, ancestral knowledge and feminist collective practices. This, as part of the project for the building of ËCONEÊRÃ, a virtual pluriversity which aims to be a space of education from and for indigenous, black and peasant communities in specific territories of the Americas. It seeks to strengthen the agency and ecological consequences of colonialism in their territories, which entails constant oppression from structural violence.