COUNTER-CARTOGRAPHIES OF RESISTANCE: INNOVATION AND ANCESTRAL MEMORY
Voluspa Jarpa
Counter-Cartographies of Resistance is an immersive textile and video-mapping installation that reclaims the map as a technology of repair. Where cartography once functioned as a tool of colonial expansion, here it becomes a methodology of listening. Based on Suma Qamaña (Buen Vivir / Good Living) and the Andean quipu system, the work builds a bridge between ancestral data practices and contemporary media, making indigenous cosmologies visible, where the territory is understood as a living body and not as extractable resources.
Thirteen suspended textile cartographies—printed, hand-painted, and marbled on water using suminagashi (‘floating ink’), an ancient Japanese ink-marbling practice—form a translucent environment. Mapped video and sound activate these layers, while a hand-knotted Quipu operates as a tactile, three-dimensional archive. The work traces the Qhapaq Ñan—the route of the historic Inca road system—and overlays histories of colonial violence, dictatorship, repression, and extractivism, revealing the entanglement of social conflict and ecological rupture from the past to the present.
Through ritual invocations performed by Mapuche machi Millaray Melinao, the installation conveys a message of healing to the territories, even addressing communities declared “extinct” by colonial violence. In its convergence of textiles, light, data, and ceremony, the work proposes an innovation with roots, uniting ancestral knowledge and digital systems to repair the rupture between peoples and the earth.