Grand Prize Winners

Inty Muenala & Yauri Muenala
Rishpa Tigrashpa, Ir y Volver; Hilar el pasado, presente y futuro, el arte y la vida

Inty and Yauri Muenala present a powerful weaving loom centred on the restitution of Indigenous names within Kichwa communities of the Andean region. Through weaving practices and interactive lanzaderas (the shuttles that move the thread back and forth), visitors witness a process in which Castilian names give way to recuperated Kichwa names, alongside the year of birth and the year of official inscription.

Grounded in Inty Muenala’s own process of name recovery and shaped through in-depth community collaboration, the work reveals the political dimension of naming as an act of self-determination and language revitalisation. Weaving becomes both method and metaphor: the bracelets materialise intergenerational knowledge, while technology is understood not as industrial progress, but as spiritual and social practice. In its steady cadence, the installation affirms continuity, resistance, and collective memory.

Voluspa Jarpa
Counter-Cartographies of Resistance: Innovation and Ancestral Memory

Voluspa Jarpa’s work constructs a woven cartography of police repression and resistance across South America. Drawing on recent histories of state violence, the project engages the Andean concept of Suma Qamaña (Buen Vivir / Good Living) as a contested and geographically embedded principle — one often celebrated in theory yet suppressed in territories affected by extractivism.

Through the revitalisation of Quipu knot-based recording systems, Jarpa rethinks technologies of documentation and power. Cartography — historically an instrument of domination — is transformed into a methodology for listening and making knowledge tangible. Developed in sustained collaboration with machi Millaray Melinao of the Rulo community (Araucanía, Chile), the work proposes recording not as neutral data capture, but as ethical and political practice.

These two Grand Prize Winners which  will be exhibited at the IMPAKT Festival 2026: Techno-Ancestrality and the Prizes of Distinction and Honorable Mentions embody the core concerns of Buen-TEK: ancestral intelligence, technological practice as responsibility, and the re-weaving of memory, territory, and community. The presence of the Grand Prize Winners at the IMPAKT Festival 2026 situates Techno-Ancestrality not as nostalgia, but as a living, critical and forward-looking practice.

In addition to the Grand Prize winners, the S+T+ARTS Prize Buen-TEK also recognises two Prizes of Distinction and three Honourable Mentions, highlighting a range of practices that engage ancestral knowledge, territory, and collective life in diverse ways.

Prizes of Distinction

Leonel Vásquez
Cuna de Humedales

Leonel Vásquez’s Cuna de Humedales proposes a floating, site-specific structure that reconnects communities with water ecosystems through ancestral architectural knowledge. By attuning to submerged soundscapes and more-than-human life, the work invites slower, attentive modes of perception aligned with the principles of Buen Vivir.

El Alto Aesthetics
El Alto Aesthetics

The collective El Alto Aesthetics reimagines Indigenous thought within a rapidly transforming urban context, engaging popular culture, markets, and large-scale celebrations. Through the fiesta as a form of ritual technology, their work sustains social networks and collective organisation while fostering cultural resilience.

Honourable Mentions

Gabriela Bìlá
Imaginary Atlas, Amazonia
An immersive research project set in Belém do Pará that reimagines Amazonian urban futures, proposing cities as hybrid territories where forest, culture, and contemporary life continuously reshape one another.

João Machado
Interspecies Architectures with Native Bees
An ongoing artistic research project developing ceramic habitats for stingless bees, creating interfaces between human and more-than-human worlds while supporting biodiversity and ecological care.

Juan Cortés
Geography of Equinoctial Plants: Counter-Taxonomy and Relational Ecologies
A spatial installation that reinterprets Humboldt’s botanical diagram using endemic Andean plants, challenging extractive classification systems and foregrounding relational ecological knowledge. 

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Image: Counter-Cartographies of Resistance: Innovation and Ancestral Memory by Voluspa Jarpa