Katxanawa, video mapping

Katxanawa is a traditional Huni Kuin song asking for abundance and luck. We built a projection around Same singing it.

The Huni Kuin are an ancient Amazonian people living between Brazil and Peru. This piece exists to honour that culture and to give visibility to a group that fights hard for its rights and remains very vulnerable.

Recognising pattern is one of the most elementary human activities. A forest built out of patterns is a metaphor for our attempt to make the underlying logic of nature visible, and recent 3-D simulation follows exactly the same principle, translating spatial perception into a geometric complex until it produces the illusion of reality.

So the proposal Same and I were developing tries to overturn the idea that indigenous cultures stand opposed to a technological understanding of the world. The opposite is true: ancestral cultures still have a great deal to offer in systems of knowledge and experimentation.