Earth Week: Tatiana Lopez: In Between Dreams and Forests

Earth Week: Tatiana Lopez: In Between Dreams and Forests by Michael O. SnyderApril 21, 2025

©Tatiana Lopez, .Atatakuinjia community, Sapara Territory, Ecuadorian Amazon rainforest, 2022. The Milky Way is seen above the Atatakuinjia community. Sapara’s stories of time and creation are tied to the stars and constellations. They believe that when the Milky Way appears in the sky, the turtles make their way up to lay their eggs.

Each year during Earth Week I curate a collection of photographic projects from artists who are working to make the often-invisible nature of the global climate and the ecological crisis more visible using conceptual, lens-based art techniques. The arts – and the visual arts in particular – have a unique capacity to confront audiences with uncomfortable truths, provoke meaningful discussion, foster empathy, and inspire individuals to take action on today’s most pressing issues.

Today, we’re looking at Tatiana Lopez ‘s project, In Between Dreams and Forests.

Tatiana Lopez is an Ecuadorian photographer, visual anthropologist, and artist. Her practice is rooted in the narratives that the body and the land trace and the role memory plays in the construction and deconstruction of identity. Through the MA in Visual Anthropology from Freie Universität Berlin, in Germany. She incorporates practice-led research and collaborative and experimental storytelling methods to explore body-territory relations, the intersectionality between identity, memory, environmental issues, and the study of human and non-human relationships through dreams. For Tatiana, photography serves as a method to (re)engage with intricate processes of self-representation.

Instagram: @tatianalopez_om

©Tatiana Lopez, Alejandra Grefa paddles her canoe to her chakra (small garden) across the river Pindoyaku in the Atatakuinjia community, 2022. For the Sapara, the river provides a means of transport, it is a vital source of food, and it is the place where people from the communities bathe. Spiritually, the Sapara believe water is a living spirit, and they must maintain a balanced relationship with it.

In Between Dreams and Forests

According to Sapara women, witsa ikichanu, “good living” means protecting the energy of the river, the forest, and the wind, maintaining an open connection to the spirit world through dreams. To be Sapara means to be the caretaker of the jungle. In 2001, UNESCO recognized the Sapara Nation from the Ecuadorian and Peruvian Amazon as an intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity after incorrectly assuming that the Sapara no longer existed due to the impact of colonialism, the rubber trade, migration, disease, and enslavement.

Today, less than 600 Sapara remain, and only three elders speak their language. My long-term project, “In Between Dreams the Forest Echoes the Song of the Burning Anaconda,” is part of ethnographic research with the Sapara Nation located in the Pastaza Province in the Ecuadorian Amazon. The project delves into themes of dreams, gender, body-territory relations, identity and belonging, and environmental conservation through multidisciplinary storytelling of Indigenous Sapara notions of ecological well-being and the local concepts of place-based perspectives to highlight the idea that the body is also considered a place of resistance. Principally because of how extractivism is rooted in the colonial dynamic of oppression over women and nature. Through documentary photography and embroidered cyanotypes and polaroids, this work explores notions of trans-corporeality and intersectionality to weave a narrative of the intimate and symbolic relationship that Sapara women share with the land, the other than human kin and how dreams reframe their sense of belonging, and identity by reclaiming their ancestral knowledge. The cyanotypes reflect connection and destruction. Symbolically, the blue color represents the bodily waters, and the red string highlights the ancestral lineage. The Polaroid images become heirlooms. By embroidering these polaroids, Sapara women become their own storytellers, showcasing their memories and oneiric experiences from a place of autonomy. Embroidery represents a mending ritual. It is a way to untie or dismantle the norms of oppression by reconstructing new narratives. Each stitch is seen as a metaphor for liberation.

©Tatiana Lopez, Portrait of Saweka Grefa. Llanchamacocha community, Sapara territory, 2022.

©Tatiana Lopez, A dead bird found in the Llanchamacocha community, Sapara territory in the Ecuadorian Amazon Rainforest, 2022. Sapara women The violence and damage that generates extractivism not only aﬀect the rivers and the land where Indigenous communities are settled, but it also has a significant impact on women’s bodies.

©Tatiana Lopez, Sapara’s notion of well-being is based on the idea of protecting the energies of the river, the forest, and the wind. According to Sapara women, rivers, waterfalls, plants, rocks, and animals have a spirit and carry wisdom that can be accessed through dreams. Women say that waterfalls have a strong spirit, and every time you visit one, the spirit of the waterfall will appear in dreams at night and give them messages. Atatakuinjia community, Sapara territory, Ecuador, 2022.

©Tatiana Lopez, Portrait of Sisa Grefa. Llanchamacocha community, Sapara territory, 2022

©Tatiana Lopez, In the Sapara cosmology, dreams connect them with the spirits of their ancestors. They say that spirits take the form of animals in dreams and in the same way that stories develop and unfold in the material world, dreams can access past memories creating a collective essence that is traced by the body and the land. Llanchamacocha community, Sapara territory, Ecuadorian Amazon rainforest, 2022

©Tatiana Lopez, Portrait of Swicha Grefa standing on a tree trunk holding vines around her body to represent her connection with Mother Earth and plant medicine. Atatakuinjia community, Sapara territory, 2022.

©Tatiana Lopez, Place and body are not disassociated, in the same manner, the human body holds knowledge, sensations, and experiences; the Sapara also considers the forest a place that is alive and able to produce knowledge

©Tatiana Lopez, A Polaroid photograph embroidered by Suyauna Gualinga from the Llanchamamacocha community in Sapara territory, Ecuador. 2022. “My name is Suyauna. I am a tree that continues to grow. I attract all the birds and give strength to the Earth.” Sapara women and men are given Sapara names at birth, they are associated with plants, animals, and the natural elements from the forest. Often they are linked to their pajus, “energies”. Due to colonization, the Sapara people were forced to change their names to Western ones. Today, Sapara women are reclaiming their birth names as an act of resistance.

©Tatiana Lopez, A Polaroid photograph embroidered by Kaji Grefa from the Atatakuinjia community in Sapara territory, Ecuador. 2022. “My name is Kaji. When I was a child, my wings grew that is why I started to fly, and I visited many communities.” Sapara women and men are given Sapara names at birth, they are associated with plants, animals, and the natural elements from the forest. Often they are linked to their pajus, “energies”. Due to colonization, the Sapara people were forced to change their names to Western ones. Today, Sapara women are reclaiming their birth names as an act of resistance.

©Tatiana Lopez, A Polaroid photograph embroidered by Tzakuana Ushigua from the Llanchamamacocha community in Sapara territory, Ecuador. 2022. “Tzakuana (wituk) is a fruit or a seed with which women dye our hair and paint our faces to look beautiful. When we bathe our hair with tzakuana, our hair becomes darker and shiny like water.” Sapara women and men are given Sapara names at birth, they are associated with plants, animals, and the natural elements from the forest. Often they are linked to their pajus, “energies”. Due to colonization, the Sapara people were forced to change their names to Western ones. Today, Sapara women are reclaiming their birth names as an act of resistance.

©Tatiana Lopez, Grandmother Mukutsawa. Cyanotype photography intervened with embroidery. 2021. Grandmother Mukutsawa is the only elder who lives in the Llanchamacocha community and one of the three elders who still speak the Sapara language.

Tags: Michael O. Snyder, Tatiana Lopez