The Falling Sky
Swiss artist and photographer Olivia Wünsche had a long interest in indigenous worldviews, environmental and humanitarian crisis. She decided to travel to Peru to work with a local NGO. She witnessed first hand what she only new from research: indigenous people are still being subjected to colonial exploitation, but now camouflaged as corporate policies. But she also found forceful resistance and a spirit to fight back by the local community which inspired her to create this series of images, collages and digital paintings.
Photography Olivia Wünsche
After years of research and interest in subjects revolving around indigenous worldviews, environmental and humanitarian crisis, I finally decided to travel to the Peruvian Amazon and work for Alianza Arkana – a grassroots organisation dedicated to the protection of land rights, biodiversity, culture and language of the Shipibo Conibo peoples in the Ucayali region. For over a month I studied and documented every initiative undertaken by the NGO, conducted numerous interviews with indigenous leaders and activists and visited local communities in both urban and rural settings.
“What I have previously known only from reading books, suddenly revealed itself right in front of my eyes as a day to day reality: the land and its peoples being subjected to the same system of colonial exploitation, no different than 500 years ago.”
In the past, conquistadors subjugated local populations into slavery, confiscated their lands and plundered natural resources, all the while annihilating native belief systems and cultures throughout the centuries of fervent missionary crusades.
Today, this imperialist formula remains very similar. Neocolonial corporate policies hidden behind the rhetoric about economic development, employment opportunities, technological progress, social welfare and the overcoming of civilisational backwardness are preached by transnational corporations and corrupt governments.
In reality, countless communities are subjected to military violence, forced assimilation, displacement, pollution, and land grabbing imposed by state authorities and corporations who carry out multimillion mining operations with near total impunity. The disappearance of traditional cultures previously fuelled by the establishment of missionary boarding schools and forced assimilation programs is now sustained by the western consumerist ideal diffused through mass media, the internet, satellite television and international commerce.
But besides witnessing the devastation brought by these destructive forces, we’ve also seen an incredible spirit of resistance. Activists and indigenous leaders fighting back by directly challenging corporations, drug cartels, mining industries or loggers. Entire collectives figuring out ways to successfully reclaim their independence through community-led initiatives.
The takeaway from this experience is simple yet crucial: solutions are there, but support is needed if we want to preserve what is left of the rainforest and its inhabitants, whose ancestral wisdom has been paternalistically disregarded for centuries of (neo)colonial conquest.
This collaborative work is an attempt to capture the intersection between nature and culture, mysticism and commerce, tradition and modernity, destruction and regeneration.
Olivia continues to work with the NGO remotely and is looking for opportunities to partner with galleries and retail spaces in London and Paris to sell Shipibo textiles in Europe to raise funds.
A series of wood prints of Olivia’s work are available. Please contact her via her website. If you would like to support the Alianza Arkana organisation, you can donate here.
About Olivia
Olivia Wünsche (Zurich, 1992) is a Swiss artist and photographer working between Zurich and Paris. She received a bachelor’s degree in graphic design after studying at ECAL, University of Art and Design in Lausanne (2018), and later went on to obtain a Masters’s in Photography, ECAL (2021). She blends different photographic techniques such as collage, digital painting and 3D.
Her work focuses on belief systems and cultural narratives as agencies of social conditioning. She’s mainly interested in viable solutions for the improvement of current sociopolitical systems: non-violent movements of resistance, communal autonomy and regenerative practices derived from symbiotic relationships between nature and society.
To see more of her work, visit her website or follow her on Instagram
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