Eliana Otta Vildoso is a Peruvian artist, researcher, and educator with a degree in Art and a Master’s in Cultural Studies from the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru (PUCP). She completed her PhD in Practice at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna with the project Lost and Shared: Approaches to Collective Mourning Towards Affective and Transformative Politics.
Otta is a cofounder of Mouries, a collective based in Athens, and Bisagra, an artist-run space in Lima. She also played a key role in curating the permanent exhibition at the Lugar de la Memoria, la Tolerancia y la Inclusión Social in Lima. An experienced educator, she has taught at the Art Faculty of PUCP, Corriente Alterna, and the National School of Fine Arts in Peru. Beyond academia, she is a yoga instructor and enjoys DJing as “Dj Flaquita,” embracing an ever-curious, amateur spirit.
Eliana Otta’s Virtual Sanctuary for Fertilizing Mourning is a project that has evolved from its debut in Berlin in 2022, at the Driving the Human festival, to its installation at Framer Framed in Amsterdam. Conceived as a hybrid space for mourning and reflection, the project has been installed in various environments, from a former crematorium turned cultural centre in Berlin to the digital biennial Hold on For Dear Life, Sensefield 2023: relationships in uncertain times (Taiwan), the Porto Photography Biennial and the ZKM in Karlsruhe.
Each space has hosted the project in a unique way, combining projections, audio, and visual elements such as drawings and elements of the jungle, thus creating an immersive and contemplative experience that explores how art can generate collective processes of mourning in contexts of violence and loss.
At the core of the project are 35 videos recorded with a 360º camera in four Peruvian Amazonian communities (Unipacuyacu, Nuevo Amanecer Hawaii, Sinchi Roca, and Puerto Nuevo) affected by the assassination of indigenous leaders and environmental defenders. These videos, available on the Luto Verde website, are complemented by 3D scans of significant objects as well as drawings of the murdered leaders.
The project, itself inspired by the Amazonian indigenous practice of Yana Allpa, explores the idea of regenerative mourning, where loss becomes a process that nurtures life, both human and non-human. The installation invites viewers to interact with these materials, encouraging a personal and reflective approach to these realities.
José Carlos Mariátegui, Victor Vich, and Eliana Otta talk about this project.
Victor Vich: In Santuario Virtual para un Duelo Fertilizante there is a fusion of voices and stories that are painful, outrageous, and sad, that meet with the vitality that is expressed in play, in celebration, in the everydayness of memory. We see allusions to the past, to the death of leaders, and the traditions of the communities, but we also see images of the present: people cooking, playing, living in the place. I wonder then, how does the future appear in what you have done, as protest, as demand, as extinction or as non-future? Is there space for the question of the future in Luto Verde, or is it taken over by the description of the present and the ghost of the past?
Eliana Otta: The presence of the idea of ‘future’ depends on each community, its own narratives and ways of showing itself. Your question reminds me of New Dawn Hawaii, represented on the web by the coffee basket. Victor Pío, son of the murdered leader Mauro, stresses that coffee is their possibility for development and that they have a mission to continue their father’s dream, which is education-oriented. Mauro was assassinated in Satipo when he was collecting the certificate for the opening of the first school in the community. They express their desire to be a modern community, linking modernity to the possibility of the new generations being educated there.
José Carlos Mariátegui: In indigenous cosmovisions, there is also a circular vision about life, death, and its processes. To what extent is this circularity also evident in these experiences? Something interesting about your work is that it is not a simple recording of a place; you have carried out thorough research work under an exhaustive process that included visits and consultations with four communities and you have made three trips to each one. Do you think that these multiple trips have allowed you to get closer to the communities? Do you think that this helped you to understand the ways in which they wanted to express the significant objects you have worked with? Can you describe this process and how you have put together your own understanding of the way in which these communities express their mourning?
Eliana Otta: At the beginning of the project, I presented it in the community assemblies, where it was crucial to be clear about their capacities and limitations to avoid creating erroneous expectations. I explained that I would use a camera on my head to record the bodily experience of what they showed me in their territories and ways of life, with the intention that the videos would serve as a means of communication and visibility. In each community, the process included initial visits, recordings, and then screenings of the videos in progress to receive feedback and adjust the work.
Each community showed very different dynamics and needs. In Nuevo Amanecer Hawaii, we were greeted with a clear and planned agenda, and I was even asked to re-enter to record the welcome. In Sinchi Roca and Puerto Nuevo, concerns were raised about the authenticity of their representation, requesting that more images of traditional dress and activities be included. Also at Sinchi Roca, some men felt that the widows’ testimonies were too personal and proposed adding a more “authoritative” voice, although they did not reach an agreement. The differences also reflected the size and complexity of the communities, with Unipacuyacu and Nuevo Amanecer Hawai being smaller and more cohesive, while in Sinchi Roca and Puerto Nuevo, there were internal tensions and problems of corruption in their leadership.
Victor Vich: On the website, the murders are explained by logging mafias, drug traffickers, and land sales mafias. There is always the discourse of memory, and also a little bit of historical discourse that links the problem to the external forces that have caused it and the internal ways of dealing with it. But there is a felt need to expand on the effects of the modern world and its violence on communities.
Eliana Otta: The talks address this dimension of structural violence. I wanted to convey that losses are not individual, that a human life that disappears is always part of something bigger and generates losses that transcend the uniqueness of that life. This is clear in the case of people who fight to defend their territories because they are defending threatened ways of life. These are contexts that experience a kind of slow death. The state lets populations die when it does not directly violate or generate actions that produce collective processes of loss. The project frames these deaths in a web of relations and exchanges with the non-human and that which exceeds the singularity of human life.
Marcelino Tangoa, leader of Unipacuyacu, is seen showing a maceration pit. We see tangible threats and subtle things, such as the use of languages that are about to disappear. There is a video where Ricardo Pereira shows me the Kakataibo language, which the children understand but no longer speak. There is a bilingualism where the original language is diluted from generation to generation, simultaneous processes of loss that transcend the individual.
José Carlos Mariátegui: Due to the expansion of digital media we assume that everything can be shared. We have the false idea that ‘information wants to be free’, although much knowledge today is in private hands. When we refer to millennial knowledge systems the dynamics are different because it is the communities who define what kind of information they share internally, and this can be very different from what they share with neighboring communities or external audiences. To what extent was it important for communities to define what information to share and what not to share?
Eliana Otta: When we screened the work in progress people agreed with what we showed. Everything was what they decided to show because we went where we were invited, and we did what we were offered to do. My experience was mediated by what the hosts decided to share. The recorded conversations were with the people who were the most hosts, leaders, and relatives of people who had been killed. There was also the language filter because they speak Spanish, but I don’t speak Asháninka, Kakataibo, Matziguenga, or Shipibo, their languages. That limited our dialogue. In the projections, for example, they made fun of each other, there was a comic dimension of which we don’t know the content, which was limiting and interesting as well, a challenge.
Victor Vich: When one enters the page, because of its layout, because of the sound of the jungle that can be activated, and because of the sensitive subject matter, one feels that one enters a sacred place. It is something related to death and mourning, but at the same time, it is something political that is linked to denunciation. I see two movements – on the one hand, the classic movement of contemporary art, which would consist of de-auratising, turning these realities into a website in order to disseminate them to a diverse public. On the other hand, a desire to re-auratise Indigenous knowledge, in the best sense of the word. The aim is to show a value so immense that it goes beyond any idea of value that art can sustain.
Ticio Escobar and Gustavo Buntinx have pointed out to us how the 20th century de-auratised art, but now in much contemporary Latin American art, the political aspect seems to consist of re-auratising certain spaces as spaces of resistance, in the face of utilitarian and mercantile reason. In Luto Verde there is an option to authorize what has been disavowed by the market, by the mafias, by brutal modernity. I wanted to ask you about this recomposition of the sacred in artistic practice.
Eliana Otta: I hadn’t thought about it, but thank you, what you say is very pertinent. I have a lot of admiration and respect for the people with whom I have developed these links, who are constantly affected by the violence in Peru. For example, there is a video where Victor, Asháninka from Nuevo Amanecer Hawaii says, ‘we have lived four years of peace’. As a community, after fleeing the Shining Path, escaping in 1987 led by Mauro, returning in the 2000s to be invaded by loggers, fleeing from them, re-establishing themselves, having four years of peace until the loggers return and kill his father and his brother Gonzalo. These are dimensions of violence that are excessive even in Peru.
This project is also influenced by my life in Europe, where climate change is talked about as a future threat, without recognizing that in colonized countries it is a constant process. There, the disappearance of worlds is a persistent reality, and populations resist as part of their ancestral heritage, living a continuous trauma rather than a fear of what is to come. Thus, links are maintained with the communal, with the collective, with what we call ‘nature’, and with knowledges that offer alternatives to what Europe and the global north see as a dead-end apocalypse. There is a paralysing side to the anti-climate crisis discourse that seems incapable of seeing all that knowledge, that constant struggle but also that affective dimension that implies a relationship with the sacred.
The fact that, in Peru, in Latin America, and in many parts of the world, so-called ‘nature’ is considered a living and sentient being, a sacred entity, has allowed us to survive the exploitation and violence that seek to desacralize vitality in order to profit, privatize and exploit. Some people risk their lives to defend what is considered sacred, with a real impact on a life that depends on a territory for survival, seeing it as an integral part of their existence rather than simply an object to be controlled.
Victor Vich: The interesting thing about the web project is that it is both an auratic and a non-auratic object at the same time. The aim is to raise awareness of what is happening with the loss of worlds and human lives, in the face of the absolute passivity of the authorities and the always self-serving mediocrity of the media. The page generates a kind of awareness that is not opposed to action, but the very space of visibility gives rise to another kind of action. What I mean is that these kinds of symbolic practices do not remain on the level of awareness, they are small activist attempts at intervention.
Eliana Otta: It’s like trying, through certain practices, to temporarily and fleetingly construct those outlines of worlds to which we aspire to belong and defend, expanding the spaces to make them more viable and less vulnerable.
José Carlos Mariátegui: I found it interesting that you didn’t understand language, not only on a formal level but also in its taxonomic structures. Roberto Zariquiey explained to me that in Kakataibo there is no word ‘animal’ as we know it, but different descriptions depending on whether the animals are domestic or not. This complexity in taxonomy reflects a holistic perception of nature, which connects to eco-social renewal, an aspect related to your artistic practice. Indigenous communities, which represent 5% of the world’s population, conserve 80% of biodiversity, and their linguistic diversity contributes to greater resilience of crops and medicines in the face of climate crises. What lessons have you learned from presenting the project? How might these experiences interact with the digital experience and co-evolve? Is there a symbiotic effect?
Eliana Otta: Showcasing the project in European cities revealed interest and respect, but also a lack of knowledge about violence against indigenous leaders. Despite the short time to develop the website, designed by Gabriel Alayza and Hermanos Magia, it was positive to see the willingness to learn. I would like to add updates, such as the territorial recognition that the leader Marcelino of Unipacuyacu is about to receive, and recent cases of assassinations such as those of Santiago Condorincón, a leader from the same area of Nuevo Amanecer, and Mariano Isacama, a Kakataibo leader. Originally, I thought the website could generate support or donations for psychological help for relatives, as when the sister of a murdered person asked for help. I would like to see the project also serve as a way to promote support initiatives.
Victor Vich: The project never ends. Seeking multiple spaces for dissemination is the most important political challenge. That challenge is no longer just Eliana’s responsibility, but that of the curators, the critics, the teachers, of all of us who come into contact with this work. It has become our responsibility to contribute to showing and disseminating it.
The original interview in Spanish was published on Arteinformado. Thanks to Eliana Otta for allowing us to share the English version of this interview.
