Weaving Tribe on Amantani Island
By Yeison Medina Medina - Jul 14, 2021
To feel that you are not in a dream, you must spend several days, in my personal case several lifetimes on Amantani Island.
To understand yourself, to contemplate that you are on an island over 4,000 meters above sea level, in the middle of a lake that has no limits in sight, is complex to assimilate. Even more so, when you are not a tourist (I am not and do not feel like a tourist anywhere!), but as a traveler, which is my way of seeing and living existence, working hand in hand with the community, sharing food and stories, shelter, laughter and thoughts with people you had never seen before and after a cold meat served in an unkuña they become your Titicaca family: the Mamani Calsín family.
I arrived at Amantaní Island thanks to the organization Muyuy Tejiendo Tribu, founded by the witch friends, in the cosmic sense of the word, Ladoyska Romero, Karen García and Karin Zárate (Kantu), in cooperation alliance with La Balanza e.V., led by Klaus Flad, and in the company of Elvis Román Rodríguez, Green builder of Muyuy.
The idea: to visit the ten communities that make up the Amantaní Island and together with my partner, photographer Sandra Ramírez Giraldo, to record visually and audio-visually the meetings between Muyuy and the communities; also, to be part of the pilot workshop of the project "Libros Con-Sientes" , which seeks through play and art, in its diverse and magical manifestations, to awaken and motivate the love of reading and reconnection with ancestral wisdom.
Meeting with the ten communities of Amantani Island.
I return. It is difficult to assimilate this trip to Amantani Island. Each and every one of the ten communities (Pueblo, Incatiana, Lampayuni, Sancayuni and Alto Sancayuni; Villa Orinojón, Santa Rosa, Occosuyo, Occopampa and Colquecachi) received us with great affection and greater expectation.
Organized, open and attentive, the communities, their community members and leaders listened to Muyuy's voices and their quest to build, through the weaving of diverse hands and multiple forces, ten eco-libraries (one per community) on the island.
Without hesitation, led by the lieutenant governors, the communities offered a space (some piece of land, others a house to be refurbished) for the construction and implementation of the eco-libraries. Why such detachment? Such confidence? The communal and communal work, the pride of their roots combined with the search to maintain them, the conviction of the collective, of weaving, are the answers that daily life gives in Amantaní.
Pilot Workshop "Libros Con-Sientes
Actually, more than one workshop, we carried out three workshops on Amantani Island, specifically in the Incatiana community, of which the Mamani Calsin family is part: Don Juan and Mama Anselma, Abel, Alexa and Juan Carlos, the guardians of the Muyuy seed on the island.
On the first day, Sandra and I led the Photography and Memory workshop (in the morning, children and youth; in the afternoon, women). With this workshop, which has already taken place in several communities and with different processes (Vereda Palmichal, Venecia, Antioquia, Colombia - Movimiento Literario Promoción de Lectura y Alfabetización / Comas, Lima, Peru - Casa Cultural Yuyay), we seek more than to teach something, to learn about human origin, about the customs of each place, about what differentiates and identifies us, about the natural riches.
With the participants we interweaved memories through the artistic intervention of family photographs, the awakening of the senses by recognizing our own and other people's elements (blindfolded) and photographic practice.
On the second day, under the name of "Libros Con-Sientes" Workshop, directed by the founders and guardians of the Muyuy seed, the children and young people of the island had that first approach to the "Libros Con-Sientes" project. As a bond: the book; the strength: the game, the fun through music, drawing, dance, the poem, the fire that dwells in each one of them, enlivened in the circle, in the sharing of the noble silence and the sweet word. From the genuine germination that each one has for knowledge.
The Yapa
The whole trip. The island has a mystique that envelops and stirs you. The stories, between mythical, cosmic and natural, emerge from the rocks, from the lake, from the chilca and the muña, from the mouths and hands that work the land, guarded by the Apus Pachamama and Pachatata.
The work is communal, as well as the party and the carnival. Everything has its ritual because life itself is ritual. There is no scarcity. Abundance is presented with food on the unkuña and the lliclla: beans, mote, chuño, potato, quispiño, tunta, kankas and chaco, edible clay, are shared in the pampamesa. Everyone eats; no mouth is left without food.
Whether to celebrate the feasts of La Candelaria or Mother Earth, the drink is multiplied along with laughter, music, dancing in a circle, in family, in communion with each other.
Going to the farm, plowing the land, offering one's sweat dignifies, fills one with pride, and slits the skin to caress the soul.
On the island the encounter is with the primordial; everything writes to you: Titicaca, the great moon of the altiplano, Taita Inti, the sunsets of fire, the picchar with Mama Coca, the untamed storms and the spinning of the Cosmos, chaos woven by sparkling threads that fall and vanish in the lake.
Everything writes to you, but as Walt Whitman's unfathomable voice poeticized, those writings must be deciphered.
Photos by Sandra Ramírez Giraldo
Share this post :Featured posts:
Featured posts: