Rerouting Media in the Living Forest
Monday, October 16, 2023, 5:00 — 6:30 PM
A History & Theory of New Media lecture, presented as part of BCNM's Latinx & Latin American Media Ecologies program and Indigenous Technologies initiative, co-sponsored by the Center for Latin American Studies (CLAS), the Media Studies program, and the Department of Art Practice

With Martina Broner, Assistant Professor, Department of Spanish and Portuguese, Dartmouth College, and Co-Founder of the Amazonia Section of the Latin American Studies Association

This talk tracks the use of a drone in Helena Sarayaku Manta, the 2021 documentary from Sarayaku Kichwa director Eriberto Gualinga that follows an Amazonian activist as she learns about the framework of Kawsak Sacha, or the Living Forest. This call from the Kichwa people of Sarayaku proposes alternative ways of relating to the forest at a time of environmental crisis, and Broner analyzes the film’s drone cinematography in order to argue that it challenges the colonial and neo-colonial desire to survey the Amazon. Broner foreground the film’s attunement to the plants, trees, and river of Sarayaku to suggest that by rerouting practices associated with drones, Helena Sarayaku Manta not only contests the problematic notion that new media guarantee access to new perspectives but also rejects any conception of Sarayaku as a territory apt for extraction—sensorial or otherwise.