Buen-TEK Prize Ceremony

Celebrate the winners of this year’s Buen-TEK Prize

11 April 2026

Tickets

The S+T+ARTS Buen-TEK Prize Ceremony celebrates the winners of this year’s Buen-TEK Prize, marking the culmination of an inspiring journey into ancestral knowledge and diverse forms of local, traditional, and ecological ways of knowing. The international jury reviewed more than 120 applications, reflecting a wide range of artistic practices engaging with Indigenous wisdom, Lo-TEK approaches, and Buen Vivir. The selected works demonstrate how artists today draw on situated knowledge systems to rethink relationships between technology, culture, ecology, and collective life.

During the ceremony, the two S+T+ARTS Buen-TEK Grand Prizes will be awarded to Inty Muenala Vega and Yauri Muenala Vega for Rishpa Tigrashpa, Ir y Volver; Hilar el pasado, presente y futuro, el arte y la vida, and to Voluspa Jarpa for Counter-Cartographies of Resistance: Innovation and Ancestral Memory. The artists will be present during the ceremony to receive their awards.

The ceremony will also recognise the S+T+ARTS Buen-TEK Prizes of Distinction, awarded to Leonel Vásquez for Cuna de humedales and to El Alto Aesthetics by the El Alto Aesthetics Collective. Members of the collective will also be present during the ceremony.

In the ceremony there will be a Piñata performance by Tin Ayala. The performance, entitled Sueño Europeo, approaches celebration as a way to counterforce colonial power relations, shifting the focus from loss to collective reparative justice. Rooted in histories of exploitation that have fueled European wealth, the piñata embodies these relations and makes visible how they continue to operate today.

Suspended above the audience, the piñata becomes both symbol and target—a carrier of tensions between the Andes and Europe, where colonial hierarchies persist through borders and migration policies. Breaking the piñata becomes an act of release: a moment in which people gather, strike it, and break open entrenched structures.

The piñata is filled with banknotes that fall as it is smashed. The falling bills and fragments point to the unequal distribution of wealth shaped by exploitation. At the end of the performance, the collected sum is used to support migration costs, symbolically challenging the borders that restrict freedom of movement. In this performance by Tin Ayala, a member of the El Alto Aesthetics collective, the piñata ritual becomes a shared act of release, redistribution, and repair.

TICKET FOR THIS PROGRAMME

What else is on Saturday?

Check the timetable to visit more programmes with your Festival Pass (5-days) or Day Pass (1-day). With the passes you can also visit the festival exhibition Techno-Ancestrality at the IMPAKT [Centre for Media Culture] and BAK Basecamp.

Saturday day pass 5-day festival pass

For more information on the festival tickets please see here

Inty Muenala Vega Yauri Muenala Vega Voluspa Jarpa

Inty Muenala Vega

― Artist

Inty Muenala Vega is a visual artist, Mindalae, and cultural manager. Studied Art at the Central University of Ecuador (1995–1999). A multidisciplinary artist, he frequently works with painting, video art, ritual performance, and drawing. He explores the spiritual relationships of Andean thought with symbolic geometry, eco-social issues, identity, and migration. He participated in the 10th International Biennial of Cuenca in 2009. He has exhibited in Peru, the United States, France, Italy, and Russia. He has received awards at the Intercontinental Biennial of Indigenous, Ancestral, and Millennial Art and has collaborated in organizing some of its editions. He is a founding member of the art collective Cosas Finas.

Yauri Muenala Vega

― Artist

Yauri Muenala Vega is a visual artist, educator, and currently a cultural activator at Yachay Tech University. He has served as a research professor at the National University of Education (UNAE). He holds a Master’s degree in Visual Anthropology from the Latin American Faculty of Social Sciences (FLACSO). He won 2nd place at the 63rd edition (2024) of the Salón de Julio. He was also a winner in the arts research category of the Mariano Aguilera National Prize (2022–2023). In his artistic practice, he explores the connections between craftsmanship and intercultural collaborative practices. He has presented various artistic and cultural interventions in countries such as Mexico, Bolivia, Colombia, Brazil, the United States, Italy, France, and Ecuador. He is the author of the book *Kikinkunawan Visualidades Comunes*.

Voluspa Jarpa

― Artist

Since 1994, Voluspa Jarpa has maintained an extensive artistic practice, presenting solo and group exhibitions in Chile and internationally. Her work is grounded in long-term research into archives, memory, and the cultural and symbolic dimensions of social trauma, with a focus on the Cold War in Latin America and the artistic activation of U.S. declassified intelligence archives. More recently, she has examined Andean social uprisings (2018–2024) in Colombia, Chile, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, Argentina, and Venezuela, tracing state violence, environmental sacrifice zones, mining, urbanization, and the weakening of democratic systems—dynamics that remain entangled with colonial legacies. Notable exhibitions include the 31st São Paulo Biennial (2014), In Our Small Region Over Here at MALBA (2016), the 12th Shanghai Biennale (2018), and Altered Views, Chile Pavilion, Venice Biennale (2019). She received the first Julius Baer Prize (2020) and an Acquisition Prize at the 16th Cuenca Biennial (2023).

Archive

Festival 2026