With support from the Public Engagement Small Grant Scheme, Runa Kawsay Raymikuna (Kichwa for “Cosmic Celebrations for Life”) brought the ancient agricultural festivities of Ecuador’s Kichwa people to life in a public photography exhibition. Held on July 26, 2024, at Cotacachi’s Casa de la Cultura, the exhibition spotlighted the spiritual and philosophical foundations of Kichwa traditions, challenging modern ideas about development, consumption, and individualism. Led by Kinti Orellana Matute, a PhD student with Kichwa heritage, the project invited the public to experience the Kichwa’s deep connection to the cosmos, honoring the cycles of corn cultivation through vivid photographs and community stories. This event, supported by local indigenous authorities, marked a significant cultural moment for Cotacachi, celebrating the Kichwa people’s worldview and inspiring a renewed appreciation for their rich heritage.
Inti Raymi – Solstice celebration of the harvest time(s)
For over centuries, indigenous peoples across the globe have been both praised for their ways of life in ‘connection with nature,’ yet also sidelined from ‘high’ politics as their voices are barely heard, and if so, not really taken seriously. Indeed, theirs is a world of profound alterity which has only been ‘interpreted’ from the outside – that is, made sense of through foreign eyes and rarely in their own terms. The project Runa Kawsay Raymikuna (Kichwa for ‘Cosmic celebrations for life’) was inspired to counter such trend by delving into the ways of life of indigenous peoples in Ecuador, specifically by exploring a set of agricultural festivities (known in Kichwa as ‘Raymikuna’) held up to our days by the Kichwa peoples of Cotacachi, a quaint postcolonial town nestled in the northern highlands of this Andean country.
Yet, rather than merely depicting ‘agricultural celebrations,’ the project aimed at foregrounding their philosophical underpinnings, which directly challenge modern ideas that act as an unquestionable frame of reference –such as the state, infinitely expansive notions of development and growth, as well as individualistic logics of consumption and unbridled competition–, all of these based on their own cosmological precepts, or what these communities see as the broader role ascribed to humans within the larger ‘web of life’ (pacha). This was done via a public photographic exhibition on July 26, 2024 in Cotacachi’s Casa de la Cultura (House of Culture) jointly organised with the local Kichwa Cultural Centre ‘Muyumi Kanki’, wherein Kichwa peoples themselves, along with their millenary traditions, were not only portrayed and took central stage, but also acted as key protagonists in its mounting, as well as during the exhibition’s inaugural event, which marked a milestone in the town’s cultural life.
Springing off a doctoral research project sponsored by QMUL’s School of Politics and International Relations and conducted by Kinti Orellana Matute –4th year PhD student from Ecuador and with Kichwa ancestry himself–, the exhibition project was thus thought of as an ethical retribution towards the communities engaged in the framework of such research. Indeed, the exhibition portrayed photographic material gathered in the context of a long-term field research (2022-2023), which led Kinti to live amongst such communities to (un)learn from their own ways of life, in particular from their alternative conceptualizations of time and space. The result –as the portrayed pictures of the exhibition attest to– was not just unusual temporal and spatial engagements, but a wholly different conception of the cosmos – that is, a peculiar way of grasping life infused with spiritual and festive connotations wherein the Raymikuna are but a small display of how to relate with oneself and others through thoroughly relational logics bearing important political and ethical implications.
As such, the exhibition aimed at depicting what these communities practically embrace as a sacred and cyclical complementarity between humans and the cosmos (pachakutik). It thus foregrounded the influence of broader cosmic forces beyond human control linked to the solstices and equinoxes and which sustain their own ways of life to our days, manifested specifically through their four celebrations (Raymikuna) which centre around the cycles of corn cultivation –or what the Kichwa consider as their sacred ‘mother’ (Mama Sara) –, namely a celebration for its sowing (Kuya Raymi), another to honour its growth (Kapak Raymi), another to honour its flowering (Pawkar Raymi), and another to celebrate its harvest (Inti Raymi). With the official endorsement of Cotacachi’s main indigenous authorities, specifically the Union of Peasant and Indigenous Organizations of Cotacachi (UNORCAC) and its Women’s Central Committee, the exhibition marked thus a fresh reboot towards the town’s multicultural dynamics, as it contributed towards the increased acceptance of these agricultural traditions not only by younger generations of indigenous peoples themselves but also by the larger public of Cotacachi, Ecuador, and why not, the world.
Credits
Main curator and contact: Kinti Orellana Matute
p.orellana@qmul.ac.uk
Kichwa local curators: Apak Perugachi & Koya Valencia
Photographic material: Joan Monterde
Illustrations: Manai Kowii
Design and mounting: Cristina Navas
Music: ‘Kachipukrus’ traditional band from La Calera
Main Kichwa communities portrayed (Cotacachi, Ecuador):
Sponsor (London, UK):
Local partner and co-organiser (Cotacachi, Ecuador):
Official endorsements (Cotacachi, Ecuador):