Student Work
Diagram indicating the “degrees of becoming” involved in the opening of the Supaychacra Clearing. Diagram by the author, 2022.
The Supaychacra Clearing in the Waorani community of Tepapade, seen while trekking through the forest with Manuela Omari Ima and her family. Photo by the author, 2022.
The author is seen trying to process chambira fibers, failing consecutively to do so. The community laughs. The author doesn’t know what jokes are made about him since he doesn’t speak wao tededo. Quoting a 6-year-old kid, “he has ears but can’t hear a thing!” Photo by Manuela Omari Ima, 2022
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Title
To Open A Clearing: Cultivating Spaces of Endurance in the Upper Amazon
Project Description
To effectively challenge the policies of extraction and depletion implemented by late liberal regimes, the Waorani communities residing in the Ecuadorian Amazon have devised spatial strategies to preserve their traditional territory. By reexamining Mary Louise Pratt’s concept of the contact zone and delving into the juxtaposition between settler and Indigenous literature, spatialities, and worldviews, this thesis suggests the concept of forest Clearings as a means to explore spatial forms of endurance.
Numerous Clearings emerge within the Amazon, where encounters between divergent worldviews have engendered otherwise modes of existence. These spaces originate from mutualistic relationships between ants and plants, the material necessities for cultivating cocoa and economic trees within traditional gardens amidst the forest, the aspiration to establish new settlements or reclaim former ones adjacent to oil platforms to assert sovereignty over traditional territories, and acts of weaving and singing while renewing a corporeal connection with the Amazon. Through a series of fieldwork reflections drawing upon Elizabeth Povinelli’s notion of quasi-events, these Clearings are perceived as spaces where ontological negotiations are more likely to occur, strategies of enduring exhaustion are nurtured, potentiality is sheltered, and forms of dominance—even if for a moment—rattle.
At the core of the thesis narrative lies the ambition of a particular Waorani community to establish a Museo Vivo, or a living museum, on the outskirts of the city of Coca. While scrutinizing the intertwined histories of museum as hegemonic infrastructures that facilitate extractive colonial projects in the region, this work nevertheless recognizes the Waorani’s appropriation of the museum as a trap to ensnare our attention and redirect the focus towards a more pressing matter: the defense of their territory. Serving as a spatial strategy to withstand the exhaustion caused by extractive practices in the Amazon, the living museum can be viewed as the creation of a Clearing—an emancipation from prevailing forms of dominance through the subversion of hegemonic ontologies. Within the Clearing, dominant self-identities “get mixed up,” inviting individuals to transcend their existing roles and fostering alternative life forms capable of sustaining a stubborn refusal to collapse.
In essence, this work serves as an invitation to acknowledge our own agency as researchers, academics, architects, and artists when navigating the ambivalent movements of establishing and suppressing Clearings during interactions with local communities like the Waorani. The work proposes that assuming responsibility as active agents within the social ecology of Clearings—embracing the condition of being “seen seen” by one another—gives rise to new collaborative practices and ontological exchanges.
