P002 → The Llama That Kindles the Wetland
‘The Llama That Kindles the Wetland’ presents a video installation that intervenes the space of the former yarn and textile factory ‘La Industrial’ (1935–1999), now Museo Interactivo de Ciencia in Quito. The project unfolds as a temporal and spatial braid—at once rooted in the Andean highlands and unfixed in time in the lead-up to a local Llamingada—a race honoring World Wetlands Day organized by the communities Sacha and Cumbijín, adjacent to the Llanganates National Park—the film resists linear storytelling. It moves forward, then backwards, and then further back still. It never stops happening. It simply shifts.
Set in Ecuador’s misty highlands, the film follows Gael, Dylan, Christopher, and Jasmín in the days leading up to the race rooted in local syncretic tradition. Amid the steady rhythm of daily rituals, gestures of care and domestication unfold beneath the breath of the mountains. A whistle echoes through the valleys, a leather whip and a shearing comb bridge the human and the non-human.
Guided by Andean cosmologies, the film drifts through pacha, space and time as a single living fabric—where the spiritual and the material intertwine like threads of the same weave. Within this landscape, the tensions between domestication, tradition, and syncretism converge in a communal ritual, revealing the intricate entanglements of power, intimacy, and spirit that shape the contemporary Andean world.
Installation view, Museo Interactivo de Ciencia (MIC), Quito, 2025.
Photos: JAG Studio