Photography of the ancestral: visual narratives about Kankuamo people in Colombia

Abstract

This article focuses on the analysis of some of the photographs belonging to the collection produced by researchers Gerardo Reichel-Dolmatoff and Alicia Dussan de Reichel, in the municipality of Atanquez, current Indigenous reservation Kankuamo (Colombia), between 1951 and 1952. The collection was published in their book The People of Aritama: The Cultural Personality of a Colombian Mestizo Village (1961). We ask the following question: Have these images served as a framework for looking at self-history or to perpetuate discourses defining what is to be Indigenous? The results include views from three categories: the connotation procedures of the image, the image statute, and polarizations between the top and the bottom.

Keywords

cultural identity Indigenous peoples Kankuamo photography visual narratives

Introduction

The Kankuamo people are one of the four native communities living in Santa Marta’s Sierra Nevada, in the north of Colombia. This highland is an isolated mountain range connected to the Andes chain that runs through Colombia. It is one of the world’s highest coastal ranges. Here, the Kankuamos share the ancestral Tayrona land with other existing Indigenous communities: Kogui, Arhuaco and Wiwa. The four peoples share myths, rituals and languages similarities. However, despite these similarities, the four communities have their own features as their historical becoming has been influenced differentially by the peasant, afro and urban cultures. That is why today we can talk about four distinguishable communities.

From the collective Cosmic Communication, conformed to by researchers, communicators and artists from Colombia and Mexico, as well as social leaders of the Kankuamo people of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, a research work has been carried out on the ancestral knowledge and communication to strengthen the organizational processes and the consolidation of cultural identity, as a result of the need to claim their position, legally and socially, as an ethnic group of Colombia. The collective has positioned itself in a dialogue of knowledge perspective (Acosta & Garcés, 2016), in which it is stated that scientific knowledge and ancestral knowledge can be articulated in a harmonious way, without one being more valuable than the other, and rather, complementing and allowing to understand those realities and contexts that cannot be interpreted through only one of these perspectives (Plaza & Campuzano, 2022).

The body of this study is an integral part of the photography collection produced by anthropologists Gerardo Reichel-Dolmatoff and Alicia Dussan de Reichel, in the town of Atanquez, between 1951 and 1952 that appear in their book: The People of Aritama: The Cultural Personality of a Colombian Mestizo Village. This book, published in 1961, originally in English, by Routledge and reprinted in 1970 by Chicago Press, reappeared in the Colombian academic scene in 2012, when it was translated for the first time into Spanish, with the support of the researcher Alicia Dussan, in an edition of Pontifical Javeriana University (Reichel-Dolmatoff & Dussan De Reichel, 2012). The book analyzes the cultural transformation of Atanquez village, current capital of Kankuamo Reserve. In this study, we can find a full ethnic description on topics such as space configuration, the culture of materialism, age groups, diets, health, education, biological kinship, ways of production and work, midwifery, the supernatural and other activities of their daily life. This book is an academic milestone among the studies made on rurality, mestizo race and cultural exchange, in a time in which the country was affected by entry of urbanization and modernization dynamics.

Since the beginning of the 19th century, Colombia as a state has tried to build a national project in which Indigenous and Black peoples were relegated, so mestizo was positioned as the central axis of a new society to be created because it was considered that the whitening of the race was the salvation of that new nation. In this way, an ideology has been instilled during the last two centuries in which mestizo social construction is made up of a triangle that situates White race on top over Indigenous and Black peoples and the whitening of these at last seeks the disappearance before the first one, making mestizo cultural identity an imposition over the citizens during the period of the incipient republic until our days (Castillo, 2007). This colonial point of view can be remarked on the words of Rachel-Dolmatoff (1985): “A fourth tribe, the Kankuama, can be considered disappeared since only a dozen individuals survive from today . . . the Kankuama were absorbed almost entirely by the Colombian mestizo population” (p. 40).

The entire collection that appears in the book consists of 12 pictures located in a supplement without clear distinction, which can be found at the end of the second section. This compilation could be classified initially as a collection composed of four portraits, two pictures that describe ritual moments, two pictures that present the collective fieldwork, three pictures that demonstrate the streets or specific geographic spots, and one that shows a family. This visual combination showing one photography on each page of the supplement is accompanied by footnote appraisals that describe the context of each picture as a final judgment.

In this article, we focus on five pictures that we consider especially relevant for showing the communication value of the gaze that is materialized through the Reichel-Dolmatoff lens in Sierra Nevada, considering their visual narrative, to reveal an ancestral and intangible visual order. The corpus of images was selected under two criteria: first, photos that reflected the segmentation of the two constituent spaces of the town, according to the anthropologist document, La Plaza, corresponding to the mestizos, and La Loma, corresponding to the Indigenous; and second, photos with epigraphs that marked identity as an axis, according to the authors. Methodologically, it was necessary to contrast images and ideologies that underlie them, to define a critical and situated position about the photographic work; however, it was considered important to allow visual categories of the Kankuamo people to emerge from the anthropological image itself, meaning that images could narrate possible gaps in historical cultural identity and social struggle as a native people.

For that reason, the question we answer on this document is: Have these images served as a framework for looking at self-history or to perpetuate discourses defining what is to be Indigenous? This study was framed through visual studies, emphasizing in how the conception and the imaginary of the equal and the different have been configured historically, and understanding that visuality as a communicative category must unveil the relations between meanings and signifiers in the production of collective senses and emotions based on the performativity of the image. The results include views from three categories: the connotation procedures of the image (Barthes, 1986), the image statute (Gruzinski, 1994) and polarizations between the top and the bottom (Didi-Huberman, 2008).

Latin American studies about Indigenous photography can be typified into three trends or approaches: the first, from classical anthropological and archeological perspective, where finds are presented about graphic productions as pictographs, arts and craftworks (Berenguer et al., 2007; Del Valle & Riveros, 2004; Joyce, 2008; Leander, 2006; León et al., 2000); the second, centered on practices where formal myths and rituals are described (Millán, 2008; Oseguera, 2008; Valdovinos, 2009; Zambrano, 2000); and the third, from the field of visual anthropology, focusing the question of historical configuration of identity from a political and critical point of view of image usages (Alvarado & Giordano, 2007; Barriendos, 2011; Corona Berkin, 2006; Flores, 2005; Giordano, 2011).

Similarly, recent researchers investigated Reichel-Dolmatoff’s inputs from multiple perspectives. One position focuses on those studies analyzing Dolmatoff’s legacy in terms of historical heritage and the symbolic comprehension of the Indigenous in the past, topics especially devoted to ethnological and archeological matters. (Arocha, 2006; Caviedes, 2007; Colajanni, 2015; Gnecco & Langebaek, 2006; Langebaek, 2005, 2017; Loaiza & Aceituno, 2015; Londoño, 2013; Pineda, 2003; Staller, 2006). A second position refers to biographical studies, in which they analyze the correspondence from the years they lived in Colombia, and others that describe their past in Europe. (Jimeno, 2015; Lomnitz et al., 2017; Morales, 2015; Oyuela-Caycedo, 2012a, 2012b; Pineda, 2011; Quiroz, 2015; Uribe Tobón, 2017; Uribe Tobón & Martínez, 2017).

In academic terms, there are scarce studies regarding Reichel-Dolmatoff’s photography despite the acquisition of the graphics archive by the Republic Bank in 2001, which made it available to the researchers. An article from Ardila (2001) describes the collection of more than 7,000 images. Moreover, several exhibitions have been held in Bogota and in different regions where the couple worked. Furthermore, a large-format photograph book called Indians of Colombia: Experience and Cognition was also published in 1996 (Reichel-Dolmatoff, 1996). The general lack of studies on this topic, particularly about this important photography corpus, demonstrates the need to deepen the communication value materialized through the relevant ethnological work done by Reichel-Dolmatoff and his lens in Sierra Nevada.

Visual narrative: the communication value analysis

The following section analyzes the extant viewpoints that contradict the terrorist notion presented by the media. In this case, a semiotics analysis will be applied using Roland Barthes’ homonymous categories posed in his book titled Obvious and Obtuse. This classification allows two different dimensions to emerge from the images. The first one will read the superficial interpretative dimension of what is seen versus the obtuse “which is not found in the language” (Barthes, 1986, p. 60) but within the emotional–interpretative area. The establishment of these interpretation zones is shaped in three directions: instructive, symbolic and poetic.

On an instructive level, we find the first sense of the message we are seeing: characters, clothing and the scenery. On a symbolic level, “it is stratified” (Barthes, 1986, p. 49). In other words, in the image two other figures are encountered: historical—cultural and aesthetic. The last level defined by Barthes (1986) is “the third direction, wrong and stubborn . . . it is a poetic expression” (pp. 49–50), in which its elements do not communicate but escape from the language; they are neither instructive nor symbolic.

During the analysis of the photographs, two other scholars’ views will be considered when studying narrative: Didi-Huberman and Serge Gruzinski. Considering Domaltoff’s view already required a connotation sense; these authors will reinforce the cultural dimension of the images to create an interpretative frame in which Kankuamo culture could have a second chance of re-definition.

The selection of the images to be analyzed is done through a connotative process. It is not a random exercise, but rather a constitution of visual narrative. The selected pictures suggest a shift from the individual to the landscape: three portraits, a landscape with people and an empty landscape. The essence of the storyline aims to find a kind of ancestral visual order through the recognition of those singularities. It means to understand how the photograph acts as a synecdoche.

Portraits: the youth from La Plaza and the man from La Loma

In The People of Aritama, Reichel-Dolmatoff follows a discourse of bias between two of the population groups: La Loma, characterized by people having Indigenous blood, phenotype and traditions, and La Plaza, portrayed as the mestizo settlers coming from villages close to the valley. The people from La Loma live on the top side of the village, while the people from La Plaza are settled near the main square and the church. These features of the population and its derived polarization reveal a series of claims with the purpose of perpetuating the mestizo condition and the ruralization of the area, hence downgrading Indigenous practices considered obsolete, not only by the La Plaza inhabitants, but rather in many cases also systematically reaffirmed by researchers.

Both 50 years ago, and again in the book’s reappearance, this last affirmation can be contrasted when Reichel-Dolmatoff & Dussan De Reichel Dolmatoff (1961) claims that

color, class and cultural differences are important factors when defining social status. . . the greatest ambition of all the inhabitants is to be respected and accepted. . . by the Creole population from the bottom lands which considers Aritama an Indigenous backward settlement. (p. 23)

Alicia Dussan de Reichel restates later that “social control was mainly executed by jealousy, gossipy, witchcraft, and some Indigenous practices” (Reichel-Dolmatoff & Dussan De Reichel, 2012, p. 13). It is a discrimination that remains nowadays displayed as a complaint by the Atanqueros (people from Atanquez) testimonies such as this one:

We are told that the Indigenous are an obstacle to the progress of this country because they are conformists with what they have instead of thinking on a larger scale, they just think to cover the basics day to day, they do not think about building an economic future starting their own business or be multinational suppliers in order to gain money. (H. Montero, personal communication, April 4, 2011)

In this sense, we analyze three portraits: two teenagers from La Plaza and the man from La Loma.

In The People of Aritama, the image footnote for the teenage boy’s picture states, “Baseball cap and t-shirt from the square youth’s Sunday wardrobe” (Reichel-Dolmatoff & Dussan De Reichel, 2012, p. 320) (Figure 1). The footnote for the girl’s picture states, “Square young woman still wearing the Spanish shawl” (Reichel-Dolmatoff & Dussan De Reichel, 2012, p. 322) (Figure 1). Both pictures portray youthful faces, and at first sight, neither of them reveal Indigenous traits and thus could have been taken in any western town or city. Both shots have been taken as medium close-up profile pictures.

Figure 1.

Mestizo teenagers with modern clothes. Boy wearing baseball cap (left) and girl wearing Spanish shawl (right) at the site La Plaza (Reichel-Dolmatoff & Dussan De Reichel, 2012, pp. 320, 322).

The combination of these pictures provides us with a clear example of Barthes’ (1986) assessment: “The photo in itself is not relevant, but it is in the sense that we find stereotyped attitudes representing meaningful elements already established” (p. 18). The photographer indicates how to pose, they look strained, we see their faces in detail, but the background is like a theater curtain. This picture could be decorating any parent’s or grandparent’s house on top of any dresser.

Similarly, in both cases, the baseball cap and the shawl lead the viewer to observe, in detail, the clothing. These objects also lead the viewer to what is known in western countries, emphasizing the null difference between these kids and those living in the bigger cities. These elements convey elegance, fashion and purchasing power through their clothing. Barthes (1986) states, “the elements are common inductors liasing ideas. . . . Possibly, the objects lack strength but have a sense” (p. 19).

From an obvious perspective, a gap between both pictures could be glimpsed. The contrast between the clothing of the boy and the girl induces us to consider two feasible times, an anachronistic gap. Although the images were taken between 1951 and 1952, the boy’s modern clothes represented in the baseball cap and the striped t-shirt differ from the girl’s outfit, and the Spanish shawl brings us to another dimension: tradition. Both photographs are influenced by western appearances but at separate moments. A strong gender distinction marked by the western time gap is materialized in the clothing.

Figure 2 is a photograph of a man from La Loma. In The People of Aritama, the text preceding the image is: “An inhabitant from La Loma. His Indigenous features reflect resignation and mistrust” (Reichel-Dolmatoff & Dussan De Reichel, 2012, p. 316). A hill and some trees background the picture. The man stands in the foreground with short messy hair, a wrinkled frown from the sunlight and a buttoned shirt reflecting the shadows from the sun and an incipient beard. Indeed, he has an Indigenous face, as they would disclose in La Sierra with a teasing tone as if they were speaking about themselves in the picture.

Figure 2.

Indigenous Kankuamo man in the site La Loma (Reichel-Dolmatoff & Dussan De Reichel, 2012, p. 316).

This picture corresponds to the obtuse meaning advocated by Barthes (1986, p. 62) “which is discontinuous, detached from history and the obvious sense. . . with an alienation to the models.” Nevertheless, in Figure 2, the model is the archetypical Indigenous, as described in the ontological form: the eyes are closed, hair uncombed, the shape of his head, the grassland mustache, his wrinkled cheeks and his lips creating a curved black line over the sides. In this image, allegedly portraying mistrust and resignation, there is a potential smile within the individual.

It is essential that analysis includes the images, the original footnotes and the context in which the photos were taken. As Didi-Huberman argues, “There is no doubt that the allegorical tradition is convened in this case to frame a specific time of contemporary history. However, this temporary set up resulting from that action enhances the complexity of the eye’s history” (Didi-Huberman, 2008, p. 182). Thus, we can see that in this picture, the history eye, its statement and image, reproduces the negative connotations with which Indigenous people are associated in the Latin American context: mistrust and resignation.

First, a natural mistrust arose from being exposed to an unfamiliar device as the photographic camera, with external actors as anthropologists and photographers; the second, in this case resignation, shows a conception that has been enforced, underpinning ambiguity on Gruzinski’s (1994) question in his book La guerra de las Imágenes (Images at War): “wasn’t it necessary, anyway, to provide the image with a strategic and cultural relevance and embrace better the charming but vague concept of the imaginary?” (p. 16). It can be seen that the strategic relevance of image responds to an apparent social agreement, with particular obstacles of recognition because of a previous determination given to the meaning of Indigenous features. But cultural and imaginary relevance involve always going further on the aptitude to identify possibilities to other implicit manifestation of the gestures, with a clear understanding of the moral eye existence.

This discursive constraint is based on what Didi-Huberman would denominate the character’s union that “arises from its diverse features becoming incompatible. Consequently, each of the gestures will express conflict, the setup, relationship’s complexity” (Didi-Huberman, 2008, p. 74). The expression, in this case, is obvious: conflict is denoted. It can be seen on his tilted head, his austerity and his little conviction expression; the setup, medium close-up shot, bringing the spotlight to his hair and his face full of scars, achieving its characteristic of being from La Loma.

The nature of this relation derives from the double structure, denotation and connotation, made by researchers and that arises from the text preceding the images, mainly highlighted in its production of meaning. Therefore, the concept of time difference from Didi-Huberman (2006) gains relevance in which the anachronism of the image

is more well-grounded recognising the anachronism necessity as an asset: it seems to be inside the object itself—in the images—the story we are trying to build. The anachronism would be like that . . . the provisional means of demonstrating exuberance, the complexity of the images’ preponderance. (p. 18)

In Figure 2, history is represented as pre-historic, archeological and alluding to phenotype and emotional features, especially its prevalence in academic discourses in the second half of the 20th century and beginning of the 21st century, where a dangerous time plasticity is mentioned, that is, the ability to erase or to endure memories.

Portrait and landscape: kid with a mule

In Figure 3, the text references the buildings. The difference in the architectural design of the big concrete house with tile roof contrasts its neighbor with its thatched roof and rammed earth walls. The landmarks are not the unpaved road, neither the kid passing by with his outstretched arms in the form of a cross, using a stick across his shoulder to carry his sack, nor the loaded mule. In The People of Aritama, the image footnote states, “a street from the village: on the right, we observe the house of a distinguished landowner from the square” (Reichel-Dolmatoff & Dussan De Reichel, 2012, p. 326).

Figure 3.

Kid with a mule walking through an earth road, in front of a house built in concrete beside an earth-wall house (Reichel-Dolmatoff & Dussan De Reichel, 2012, p. 326).

According to Didi-Huberman (2008), the image’s composition exhibits both top and down polarizations. For example, in this photograph, we can see “how certain spaces contribute to the destruction of other ones” (Didi-Huberman, 2008, p. 61). The architectural elements again generate an anachronic gap: concrete, its right angles, its big door, the window’s screen, the ventilation and the tile roof almost seem to belong to another image, while the next house represents a different order: small, untidy and permanently stained. The anachronic gap emerges from the space configuration, between the traditional, as if time stood still,—and the modern world the contemporary Kankuamo individual is found. They are inhabitants of temporal gaps.

Gruzinski conducts a comprehensive study on the pictures’ role during America’s invasion. He supports the idea that “mechanical reproduction constitutes an unprecedented revolution not seen before in the media, similar in its extent to the printed media dissemination. Likewise, it matches America’s discovery and colonization and seizes the opportunity to offer an image conquest” (Gruzinski, 1994, p. 81). In this picture, not only a late-stage conquest of the original lands is highlighted but also the role of the architecture and its contrast, with what it visually obscures, destroys and disregards.

However, Gruzinski himself found a peculiar trait in Indigenous resilience to what he called “the war of images”: the Indigenous visuality was an overwhelming expression of certain presence rather than a simple copy or trace of a model brought to the continent by Europeans, which once again creates a breach in the continuation of colonial discourses “if the image confronts that many obstacles are due to a structure manifestation that exceeds itself, a visual order and furthermore, an imaginary construction in which the conscious and unconscious assimilation is a synonym of westernisation” (Gruzinski, 1994, p. 90). Nevertheless, at the end it always prevails as a trait that survives the colonization process. For example, in this image, the author did not even consider mentioning the child in the footnote—despite him walking silently, without turning his head, without interest, through his territory, pushing his loaded mule toward his house, which resembles more those old and untidy buildings in the background.

Landscape: the fence

Figure 4 is a blurred picture presenting the cruel practice of dividing the two populations: mestizo and Indigenous. In the background are two thatched houses and a large tree projecting an obscure, almost black, and spooky shadow. The image is taken from a gravel path with a huge stone in the foreground, following a cane fence, a dead and a living tree beside the fence.

Figure 4.

Cane fence that marks the division between the mestizo and Indigenous part of the village from the photographer’s perspective (Reichel-Dolmatoff & Dussan De Reichel, 2012, p. 321).

The image represents a fundamental social division, “a large wooden fence [that] divides the two neighborhoods from the village; it divides the two ways of life as well: the ‘Spanish’ and the ‘Indians’ [as written in the original work]” (p. 321). At the end, it represents the separation between the civilized colonizer and the uncivilized Indigenous populations; binary comprehension practices between the correct and incorrect, luminous and obscure, body and spirit, reason and emotion, shape and content.

This image displays more than a fence, it displays an inexorable breach. Nothing seems to connect both sides, both worlds and origins. It is more than a civil censorship, lack of common pain; it is the continuity of the ancient world which wants to be forgotten by some people who think that it was obsolescent, but it does not allow it. The photographer stands in front of the fence and that is the place where he wants us to be; however, the fence affects the fate of both sides. Maybe that is why Alicia and Gerardo Reichel-Dolmatoff had to reframe their research, as they declared, “instead of thinking in disintegration and institutional breakdown terms and its underlying values; the disruption of society, we acknowledged the fact that those concepts were full of values” (Reichel-Dolmatoff & Dussan De Reichel, 2012, p. 25).

However, the visual discourse argues something different. This fence, acting as a wall, represents a moment from the colony; it is not a vestige, it is its present. Like Dubois’ hypothesis, “once out in the world, it installs itself in the anachronical beyond and unchangeable image world. It enters forever in something outside death’s world. Detention (final) upon the image” (Dubois, 2015, p. 147). This picture is the synecdoche aimed at this research: it addresses the situation of a community and other villages confined between fences, between their ancestral narratives and their modern needs.

Gap inhabitants

This analysis of Dolmatoff’s photographs of Kankuamo people unveils that the constitution of Kankuamo identity arises through a temporary gap in systems, dissociated from colonization processes. The photographs show a tension that traces an imaginary line that marks historical zones that transit between traditional and the modern and between the self and the foreign. From Barthes’ semiological view, photographic signification first comes from informative and symbolical levels, as we mentioned in the section before, but this analysis omits the third sense, named by the author as the poetic sense, conformed by the place of visible shapes that are not related to language and belong to denotative character of images; it means the identity that is beyond the aesthetic connotation shown in Dolmatoff’s photographs.

On this matter, the temporary gap becomes image through emotionality transmitted by photographic details, which deliver a series of features that can help visualize a Kankuamo individual, especially between the images of the kid with the mule, the man from La Loma and the fence. Among them are found a series of single characteristics fitting the registered individuals, the objects and the spaces (Campuzano, 2019).

In Figure 5, we approach a renewed connection between the thatched-roof house, the hair of the man from La Loma and the dry tree close to the cane fence.

Figure 5.

Apparent and coincident untidiness in the images of the thatched roof, the man’s hair and the tree of the Indigenous part of the village. (Reichel-Dolmatoff & Dussan De Reichel, 2012, pp. 326, 316, 321).

In these crossroads emerges a characteristic defining the traditional: the untidiness. This visual find lays out more than an aesthetic issue, a visual order between bodies, objects and nature, and lets original emerging beyond Dolmatoff’s connotation.

Thus, Kankuamo identity is a tension which relates two temporalities. The pole of the origin, represented by characteristic untidiness, in strong relationship with nature and territory, refers to something out of the order proposed by modernity from the photographer’s points of view. So, Kankuamo identity is found in certain unperceived details, hidden in the denotative level of image, living inside the temporary gap.

In Figure 6, we see the modern pole represented in side-by-side close-up views of Figures 1 and 2. Here, the teenage boy’s striped t-shirt and the vertical and horizontal lines of the concrete house propose a different modern formal configuration in which straightness counters countered the original untidiness seen in Figure 5. Straight lines are propagated accurately in architecture and bodies, clearing any trace of imperfection.

Figure 6.

Straight lines from the teenage boy’s t-shirt and the concrete house window are representations of western modernity. (Reichel-Dolmatoff & Dussan De Reichel, 2012, pp. 320, 326).

Visual analysis of the images allows us to understand some of the cultural traits that images show in their own temporal context, in a specific historical frame. Children, in their modern marking, smile; the man from La Loma is resigned. The tensions between smile and resignation, between untidiness and straightness, are visual categories that show Kankuamo identity as a gap, inhabited by subjects; photographs unveil an identity fragmented because of dual temporalities. Being Kankuamo, nowadays, means to be connected with the contemporary world, but without leaving behind the characteristics which seem to be rooted in their Indigenous origin.

Conclusion

At the time of publishing The People of Aritama, Gerardo Reichel-Dolmatoff and Alicia Dussan affirmed that Kankuamo were no longer Indigenous but rather a mestizo people with Indigenous roots. This statement has signified an intense social struggle for their legal and symbolic recognition, achieved from the constitutional guarantees on ethnic and cultural diversity, and overall due to the constant gestation of organizational processes around recovering ancestral memory (Plaza, 2019). Although the ethnological work analyzed is a construction anchored in a particular historical context, it allowed discursively blurring of the ethnicity of the Kankuamo. However, as it is shown in this document, the photographic work allows exploring the potency of the image, especially regarding coexistence of modern and traditional categories, as well as the validity of different times in the same visual order (Gutiérrez et al., 2021) and the evident union between Kankuamo people and their territory, which transcends the question of discursive perpetuation and places the findings in the constant resignification of being Indigenous in the perspective of a dialogue of knowledge.

Footnotes

Authors’ note

Jeannette Plaza Zuñiga is a Colombian Professor, researcher, and creator. She holds a PhD in Communication, a master’s degree in Social Research and a bachelor’s degree in Education. In her first years of research, she developed topics such as evaluation and accreditation, achieving the foundation of a National Accreditation System for University Programs. She has participated in several projects with UNESCO and PNUD. She was chair of the Research Advance Office at the National Institute for Education (ICFES), worked as Chair of the Research Department at Distance National University, was a consultant in the Colombian University Association (ASCUN) and led regional education programs with the Foundation for Higher Education (FES). In the last 15 years, she has been dedicated to exploring Indigenous epistemologies and the relation to the sacred from an intercultural and decolonial perspective. She is a Professor in the Communication-Education Program, a member of the research group Youth, Cultures & Powers in the School of Communication at Corporación Universitaria Minuto de Dios—UNIMINUTO, and a member of the Cosmic Communication Collective.

Catalina Campuzano Rodríguez is a Colombian researcher and creator. She holds a PhD in Communication, master’s degree in Education, and bachelor’s degree in Languages. Before her formal studies, she approached journalism, art and literature in universities in Colombia and Russia. Her work has developed into two lines, communication and arts, and Indigenous communication. In recent years, she has centered her interest in political imaginaries, intercultural communication, narratives, aesthetics, photography and visual studies. She has been the editor of several publications about education and communication practices and knowledges. Currently, she is the Research Leader of the School of Communication, a Professor in the Communication, Development and Social Change Program, and a member of the research group Communication, Language & Participation at Corporación Universitaria Minuto de Dios—UNIMINUTO. She is also part of the Cosmic Communication Collective.

Martín Kanek Gutiérrez Vásquez is a Mexican artist and researcher. He holds a master’s degree in Visual and Plastic Arts from the National University (Colombia) and a bachelor’s degree in Visual Arts from the Yucatan High School of Arts (Mexico). He has done four individual exhibitions which stand out: Paths and Routes in the Frontground Galery / Manolo Rivero (2011, Mérida, Yuc.) and in the collective exhibition White Night (2014, Bogotá, Colombia), Reverse Landscapes (2011, Mérida, Yuc. México) and Controlled Accidents (2008, Cd. de México). His interest revolves around ancestral poetics, ritual aesthetics and quotidian poetics. He is a Professor in the Social Communication & Journalism Program and a member of the research group Communication & Social Construction at Corporación Universitaria Minuto de Dios—UNIMINUTO, and a member of the Cosmic Communication Collective.

Cosmic Communication Collective:

Declaration of conflicting interests

The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship and publication of this article.

Funding

The authors disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and publication of this article: This research was supported by the Faculty of Communication of the Minuto de Dios University Corporation - Uniminuto.

ORCID iDs

Jeannette Plaza Zuñiga

Catalina Campuzano Rodríguez

Martin Kanek Gutiérrez Vásquez

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(2007). Etnicidad y nación: el desafío de la diversidad en Colombia [Ethnicity and nation: The challenge of diversity in Colombia]. Universidad del Valle.

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(2021). Habitar la imagen. En busca de lo micro-inmanente por medio de la poética [Inhabit the image. In search of the micro-immanent through poetics]. Panambí. Revista De Investigaciones Artísticas [Panambi. Artistic Research Journal], 11, 85–96. https://revistas.uv.cl/index.php/Panambi/article/view/2545

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