The Ancient Sapara Community of Torimbo
Ramiro Aguilar Villamarín
Turikia is an indigenous community located deep in the Ecuadorian Amazon jungle. It is the first community of the Sapara Nation, one of the original peoples of the Northwestern Amazon. From here, the Rukuguna Sapara (ancient Sapara) departed to form the rest of the communities in their actual territory. Their language, almost extinct, refuses to die. Their history, written in the territory, survives in the memory of their elders. Their most recognized tradition is a particular ability to dream: they are known for being the people who dream, through their dreams they dialogue with the forest.
They are an ancient nation, by the middle of the 19th century their numbers were more than 20,000, but today they barely exceed 500. From colonial times to the present, they have faced the plagues of white men, the overexploitation of their labor force in the “reducciones” and in the rubber boom, and the division of their people and families due to the religious missions and the war between Ecuador and Peru in 1941.
In recent decades, the descendants of the ancient Sápara have faced State and foreign interests to exploit the resources of their territory: oil and timber. Their traditional and harmonious way of life with nature has been their resistance and survival, but they continue to be excluded and marginalized from basic rights such as access to health services, quality education, communication to the exterior and public transportation, especially with the deepest communities in the jungle, one of which is Turikia.
In this scenario, the first founded community of the Sapara Nation is an example of the resistance and daily struggle of an indigenous people who refuse to die. Turikia, as Sapara, along with the rest of the original peoples of the Amazon, are responsible for having created and maintained the immense biodiversity that characterizes this immense basin. Without them, the rainforest would not exist.
By now, they have faced several Covid-19 waves, and even though their natural medicine has kept everyone in the community alive, they still lack the medical attention for the aftereffects of this global disease.
This project testifies the daily resistance to the systematic and still present extermination through which the Sápara Nation has gone through. It represents the work of more than two years of research and more than a year of sharing with the Sapara of Turikia since 2018. Their way of life is proof that human beings are not the worst thing that has happened to the planet. They are the living contemporary evidence that we need to see and treat the world in a radically different way: as a great forest with whom it is possible to communicate, and thus form a society with the great diversity of beings (human and non-human) that inhabit it.
With this project, I explore photography as a social act. The whole project is the weaving of the different links that I, as a researcher/photographer, established with the Sápara community of Turikia. Photography went from being mediation to relation. From the start, we formed a bond based on reciprocity that has developed into a strong friendship.
I do not intend to impose a single vision or reading about this indigenous nation, or what the community is like, or how they live in the jungle. On the contrary, my intention is to question the very authorship of these images: each photo is the representation of an encounter, through it speaks both: the one who had the camera and those who were in front of the lens. The image is due to both parties as well as to those who observe and read them.
Here I expose the relationships that I, as an urban latinx, maintained with this particular Amazonian society: with its inhabitants, with the activities and materialities that we shared, with the river and with the forest. Thus, this project, more than being the story of Turikia, is the story of our encounter.