Private Story
Runa Kawsay
Summary
Runa Kawsay is a transmedia long-term project that explores indigenous identity, the connection between body and territory, and traces the history of Kichwa migration through the personal histories of the Kichwa migrant community in North America.
In Kichwa, the term Runa Kawsay refers to the everyday moments that nurture the culture that sustains us. For many Kichwas in the diaspora our everyday personal rituals and collective celebrations become a blend of deeply rooted traditions with adaptations that reflect our realities in the different territories we occupy. It is my goal to document the everyday moments in which our culture exists and how it is transferred between the community.
By starting this long term project with my own story in the first chapter “Wilkay” I encourage my collaborators to use image making as a space for empowerment and challenge colonial practices that have attempted to silence us for more than 500 years.
In collaboration with Kichwa families, youth and the New York based artist collective Kichwa Hatari, I have been using oral storytelling, archive explorations, digital art, audio recordings and video pieces to explore and understand our history as indigenous migrants and shed light on the unique challenges that we face as indigenous peoples displaced from our home territories.
Through this project, I seek to challenge stereotypes and break-down romanticised narratives about my community and contribute to a larger dialogue around recognising indigenous migrant communities. Indigenous migrations have had a tremendous impact on the make-up of the US and Canada, especially in large urban areas like New York City. Despite the fact that indigenous migrants make up a large percentage of the workforce, there is little recognition of the unique experiences and needs of our communities. The pervasive erasure of indigenous migrants, discrimination and lack of community services have pushed many families to see indigeneity as a disadvantage and many choose to assimilate. Growing up in suburban Canada, I often felt the othering and weight that being indigenous can be. My lived experience is what inspires me to do this work.
Within the support of this grant, I will continue creating this multi-chaptered project and begin photographing the second chapter titled “Ayllu” (Kichwa term for kinship groups) In the month of May, I have confirmed plans to photograph Kichwa families I have been working with in Wisconsin. In April through early August, I plan to host community workshops around archive image preservation with the goal of tracing our history of migration through family histories. The month of September will be devoted to postproduction and the outcome will be a community exhibition / installation in New York City during the month of October. I plan on devoting some of the funds for honorariums, and to hire an indigenous developer to create an immersive digital platform to house the work for the community. In the upcoming year, I envision parts of the project published in various publications where I am building relations such as the Smithsonian Magazine and National Geographic and I will begin pitching this series as a photographic book.
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