Belonging to a known family of textile-makers, chiefs, and ayahuasca taitas and a weaver of the Kamëntšá nation, Narcisa Chindoy created this piece by imagining a much longer version of the belts worn in Sibundoy Valley, Colombia. She takes traditional motifs that stand for animals, places, and ideas, using them to create a writing system that narrates the histories of the valley. Over several centuries, the Kamëntšá Indigenous people have been successively occupied by Inca, Spanish, Colombian settlers, and, in recent decades, by different factions active in the narco-civil war, which greatly affected the area. The ‘score’ that unfolds along the belt is thus an artistic act of resistance, of writing one’s own repressed history by mobilizing available resources—symbols, weaving traditions, and stories—to compose a language of struggle with a singular vocabulary and grammar. The piece must also be read through her family’s role as companions in the spiritual journeys undertaken with the guidance of ayahuasca medicine. Ayahuasca practice offers the possibility of travel and transformation while remaining within the physical bounds imposed by one’s life and historical circumstances. Its role as a practice that has continually resisted different waves of colonial genocide—particularly in the Catholic missions in Putumayo—is yet to be fully recognized.

Work in the exhibition: Untitled/Chumbe Kamëntšá [Kamëntšá-Schärpe] (early twenty-first century), woven fabric, 1700 × 7 cm. Courtesy of private collection