Onkiyenani Aranipa (women looking)

Romelia and Elena bathing in the Miguagono River. Community of Miguagono, 2017

Grammar phrase found on the blackboard at Tiwino school. Tiwino Community, 2017

Guime Ima and the newly harvested chambira. Tepapare community, 2021

We are all visitors in this place at this time. We are just passing through. Our purpose here is to observe, to learn, to grow, to love ” Indigenous wisdom. Dicaro, 2017

Carolina Lengua weaving a basket. Community of Tepapare, 2021

I would like to say that I am free, that I can walk through the jungle without fear, but it is not true, it is no longer the same place my grandparents told me about” Dorita Boyatai. Tiwino community, 2014

The river is like a window in our house, which is the jungle, if you walk through the forest you can’t see everything at once, but if you come to the river the vision expands, you can observe better around you, you can feel the fresher air and see many animals” Story by Manuela Ima. Tiwino Community, 2017

“Somos territorio” Pikenani (abuelo) Mincaye Enqueri. Tzapino community, 2013

Tapare Huani is a Waorani woman who lives with her husband and children in Boanamo, a community on the banks of the Shiripuno River in Yasuní National Park in Orellana province. In 2016, her son Caiga was speared by a Taromenani (Indigenous Peoples in Isolation) group while boating with his wife Tweñeme on the Shiripuno River. Tapare holds one of the spears found next to the body. Boanamo community, 2017

We are the voice of the jungle, of the rivers , the trees and the animals” Waorani women singing at the Meeting between nationalities. City of Coca, 2015

“We women are looked at, we are usually the object of another’s gaze, and that other’s gaze is usually male. It is photographers, men (almost always white), foreigners, outsiders, who penetrate certain lands and cultures to capture them and turn them into miniatures that will form a memory. In the Amazon, however, the shutter has been opened by other hands, so that other eyes can capture the memory from other angles. Six eyes are looking, three fingers are shooting: those of Manuela, Romelia and Carolina. Three women have captured miniatures to turn them into large format images that show the handicraft production of the Waorani women; more than anything else, they show the coexistence of the photographers with the community throughout almost ten years in a territory threatened by oil exploitation.

Activist Ivonne Yáñez maintains that it is the indigenous women who resist the entry of oil companies into their territories; they are the ones who know, without the need for PhD degrees, how oil violates their rights and affects their lives. They are the ones who create new forms of livelihood. They are the ones who understand local sovereignty. And with their knowledge, they resist. In this case, with their gaze, their appropriation, their portrait of reality, the reflection of what they think and what they are. And because of this, because of their resistance, they become uncomfortable in the face of extractivism.” Cristina Mancero. ETI 109, 2017

Women Watching is a collective project made up of three friends: Manuela Ima (Waorani), Romelia Papue (Kichwa-Shuar) and Carolina Zambrano (mestiza), who have had close ties in the Waorani territory for many years. The project was born with the initiative of Manuela, artisan, leader and former president of AMWAE (Association of Waorani Women of the Ecuadorian Amazon). We get together to weave images that we collect over time, the interventions are made with chambira thread that Waorani women process and obtain from the jungle to make their handicrafts, women who we have accompanied from photography and actions of revaluation and distribution of tissues in the international arena, strengthening their economic autonomy, resistance for memory and the future. We weave in a gesture of friendship and intercultural coexistence, as a symbolic act to dialogue with the origin, to turn our gaze to those who have known how to care for the territory for millennia and enhance it.