Water Is Life: Minka for the páramos
The páramos are the most diverse high-altitude ecosystem in the world and are only found in the Andes Mountains, at altitudes of more than 3,000 meters.
They are home to an estimated 5,000 species of plants and animals, many of which are endemic or found nowhere else on Earth.
Known as “water towers”, moorlands act as natural reservoirs, capturing moisture from clouds and fog and gradually releasing it into streams and rivers.
An estimated 40 million people, including people in Ecuadorian Andes, depend on the páramos for drinking water.
Mining operations, both legal and illegal, are destroying habitat, poisoning water and soil, and threatening the integrity of páramo ecosystems and the communities that depend on them.
Local communities are pushing back.
How to respond collectively when racial and extractive capitalism is overwhelmingly taking over the world?
With campesinos and Indigenous communities, we speculate on the possibilities of living differently. Through everyday practices that unashamedly weave unconventional (often discarded) ways of being, knowing and doing, we engage with the present and hold multiple histories to create futures worth living.
In Cuenca, we propose public interventions at the intersection of the arts and social pedagogy. An art exhibition and poster bombardment serve as catalysts for dialogue and persistent reminders that, through a constitutional referendum, the Andean city has unwaveringly decided to keep its waters and soils free of mining and other forms of extractivism. Through these aesthetic-pedagogical interventions, we pose a persistent affirmative question: How can we mobilize and create collectives in favor of a livable future for all in the midst of the rapidly expanding mining complex?
These practices are developed as resistance to the infernal alternatives offered by Canadian mining corporations that constantly limit life through the appropriation of land and water. Sown with hope and a livable future, these life alternatives are also realized in the difficult but vital Andean flow of body-territory.
In Saraguro, under a highway wall that they transformed into a powerful mural reflecting the strength and determination of the Saraguro people to protect their territory, a group of Indigenous women delicately and precisely thread their collective memories with the land and waters using ancestral embroidery practices.
