I was definitely in another reality.
The world was passing my eyes as if it was the first time, indomitable, unclear, rebelling against all my certainties and structures. Questioning everything I know.
Everything is painted with a special colour, lucid, warm.
The Pones sail until they touch the sun, seeking strength and understanding. They bring back knowledge to use in the material world, expanding reality. These journeys are impregnated with shapes, colours and sounds that are born and die there. They cannot live elsewhere.
I notice that they have another way of looking, an eternal look of great clarity. Tenka Kirano taught them how to see in total darkness.
The long awaited party arrived and Suyun attended, many fell in love with him, without knowing how this would transform them, now these women are projected next to the sun, using water and rain to appear and disappear.
The starts, the children, the leaves, they all have an extraordinary force inside of them from the moment they start to exist. Always present, this power allows them to communicate among them in silence, without speaking.
This place slowly stopped me; suddenly it became easier to breathe.
Slowly, my mind quits the anxiety and starts to taste, starts to live.
I love this reality; I wouldn’t like to wake up.
There is so much light, flooding the entire place.
But to live here takes a lot of courage as well, some animals want to steal your identity, your brother´s your mother´s, and when they do, you need to be very careful to recognize, as you won´t notice the differences with their real form.
If you find out, they will fly embarrassed and never return.
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“While I complain of being able to glimpse no more than the shadow of the past, I may be insensitive to reality as it is taking
shape at this very moment, since I have not reached the stage of development at which I would be capable of perceiving it.”
Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Sad Tropics (1955)
How to represent a reality where cosmology and mythology are crucial factors of everyday life, yet are intangible?
To only depict the physical side would have felt like reinforcing an often stereotypical and misconstrued image of the Tsáchilas,
an indigenous group situated in the foothills of the Andes in Ecuador.
Tenka Kirano is a joint project with the Aguavil family, which intends to create a visual representation of a reality that does not
reveal itself within a glimpse. Our aim is to awaken the notion of how the Tsáchilas perceive and understand the world,
presenting a photographic tribute to this often-unknown imperceptible side.
