Valuing the Ancestral Knowledge of Indigenous Peoples, Custodians of Native Corn and Pachamama
Location:
Pisily, Yampara Suyu, Chuquisaca, Bolivia
Art Medium:
Video
Partner:
ONG Realidades
Artist:
The Challenge
The Yampara nation in Bolivia’s Chuquisaca department safeguards more than 20 varieties of native corn, part of a genetic and cultural heritage built over generations. But Yampara youth are growing up disconnected from that heritage at the same time that the broader Chuquisaca public undervalues both the culture and its sustainable agricultural practices. The result is a feedback loop in which the custodians of the corn go unrecognized and their knowledge is not transmitted, even as a national law concerning Yampara political rights was being debated.
The Action
• Dialogue circles and brainstorming with 19 Yampara secondary-school students in which they identified the elements of their culture they were proudest of and the threats they faced
• Interview training for the students, who then collected video and audio testimony from their parents and grandparents during school vacation, building the raw material for an art film
• Co-creation of the film’s script and direction with the students, anchored in the testimonies they had gathered, and production of the final piece with a project artist
• A series of screenings of the finished film at the school, with the corn custodians, with the new elected Yampara authorities, and at an intercultural meeting in Sucre with urban digital activists
The Impact
• A short art film documenting Yampara identity, native corn, and ancestral agricultural practice, now archived and screened repeatedly inside the nation and at two regional museums (Casa de la Libertad and MUSEF)
• 161 social-media viewers, ~180 attendees of paired traveling photo exhibitions, and audiences of 120 children at the MUSEF short-film cycle, taking Yampara identity to publics that previously did not know it
• The film actively used by new Yampara authorities to lobby legislators during the national debate over their right to direct political participation
• Curriculum commitments from the Pisily school’s director and teachers to integrate native-corn varieties and cultivation into classroom material, plus digital-activist commitments to push for adoption of the corn law’s regulation
Photo Gallery
