Roberto Huarcaya is a Peruvian photographer and visual artist known for his experimental photograms that capture the essence of Peru’s landscapes. He studied psychology, cinema, and photography, founded and directed Lima’s Centro de la Imagen, and has exhibited widely, including at the Venice Biennale, Paris Photo, and Mois de la Photo. Rember Yahuarcani is a self-taught artist, curator, and activist of the Aimenɨ (White Heron) clan of the Uitoto Nation, whose work preserves and reimagines Indigenous mythology through depictions of Amazonian flora, fauna, and ancestral stories. His paintings confront the impacts of illegal mining, drug trafficking, and cultural extractivism while affirming the enduring spirituality and resilience of his community.

Hauracaya and Yahuarcani’s collaborative project seeks to redefine the colonial perspective of landscape by centering the historical, social, and mythical processes of Peru’s Indigenous peoples. Huarcaya utilizes the early photographic technique of the photogram to capture the landscape, creating exact reproductions of objects through direct contact so that “nature draws her own picture.” The location of a photogram is chosen in dialogue with the Indigenous community Huarcaya works with, in this case, Los Cejas, who read the land through an innate, ancestral knowledge that Huarcaya admits he does not possess. Through a process of decolonial unlearning—questioning Western assumptions about authority, context, and who is helping whom—the work positions the paper itself as a narrative vessel. The jungle becomes a third collaborator: long exposures made over hours or days record its constant movement, from animals walking, to tormentous weather patterns, to mold growing over the paper. The work becomes a repository of Indigenous memory—a living archive of what is happening to the jungle and to the people who inhabit it.

Layered atop the photogram, Yahuarcani paints figures based on Indigenous Peruvian mythology, further merging environment, story, and community into a single, living landscape. The painted figures draw from the Huitoto (Huitoto/Huíto) myths of creation, embodying ancestral forces that continue to shape both land and life. Gitama, the hummingbird and great sun; Buinaima, the creator; Fulgroco, the moon; and Yojero, the wind, appear across the photogram as guardians, witnesses, and cosmological anchors. Yahuarcani and Huarcaya honor Indigenous cosmologies while documenting the jungle’s ongoing transformation, creating a landscape that resists the West’s social and political hegemony.