Children, Artistic Practices and Land
As land and water relations are threatened by violent forms of extractive capitalism, children in Nabón’s communities collectively engage with processes that highlight their everyday relationships with the territory. By highlighting we do not mean only emphasizing relations in which they already participate, but also intensifying and reconfiguring these existing land-water relations. Through slow and at times bumpy processes, we speculate with different modes of attention. These processes become life-sensitive, amiable (amorosas) narratives of mutuality. These are cuerpo-territorio stories because they are narrated and embodied at the same time. They are imagined and lived, all at once and as they completely blur and challenge any separation between cuerpos (bodies) and territorio (land).
Listening, alongside practices of attention, bring children closer to the land and to the stories told by women and others. Slowly, children create stories that simultaneously re-story extractive human-land relations. Children draw and do collage. They harvest clay (a prominent element in the land and in the traditional practice of brick making) and create stories.
Through this, we create processes of immediacy. That is, processes that bring the children into active involvement with their territory while they weave a collective identity. The materials used are familiar to the children, yet the creation of the artifacts is freighted with new forms of meaning that is the children’s participation in their culture.
The various artistic practices and collective walks the children engage in nourish their mutual relations with the land. These interrelated practices felt uneven, sometimes fragmented and even procedurally raw; yet their inventive and enabling nature to allow certain sense of agency in the children. In this doing, collage became prominent.
Collage not only evokes the hybrid and layered language of the Andean context, but it also lets us experiment with re-mixing, re-contextualizing, and re-creating as invitations to dream, re-imagine and re-populate with new characters the stories children create in close relation with the land.
These spaces of co-creation– clay harvesting, giving form to objects and storytelling – evoke ancestral presences. In this way, the coexistence between the past and the present is not only made visible but also intensified. Children cocreate micro-stories, sculptures and prints that honor the Pachamama and local presences: El Mozo mountain, its rivers and the waterfalls, its animals, and peoples.
These stories, prints and sculptures are exhibited in the communal halls, creating an intergenerational dialogue where others encounter the children’s material and affective entanglements with the world.
