Mountains as Living Ancestors
Interview with Amanda Piña
Mountains shape our landscapes with vast valleys and interconnected ranges – and are crucial for the balance of our planet. At the Zürcher Theater Spektakel, the Mexican-Chilean choreographer, dancer, and curator Amanda Piña presents her work «Mountains in Resistance – The School of Mountains and Water» on a site-specific performative walk across the Allmend. In this project, she explores the interconnection of indigenous traditions, scientific knowledge, and our environment. In conversation with the writer and curator Paula Thomaka, Piña discusses the relationship between the Andes and the Alps and how we can rebuild and cherish our connection to the mountains.
Paula Thomaka: In 2014, you started your long-term research project «Endangered Human Movements», focusing on human movement practices between anthropology, history, philosophy, visual arts, dance, choreography, and contemporary-traditional indigenous Amerindian knowledge. What was the starting point for your research?
Amanda Piña: I have always been interested in different forms of dance in the context of social practices that exist beyond the modern colonial matrix. And, I am interested in other worlds of sensing and meaning, other ways of being together. I started to look at how cultural traditions, dances, forms of movement, and social practices have disappeared in some areas together with the loss of biological diversity. The starting point of the project was to look at how other forms of being in the world are threatened by the current system. What stood out is how biological and cultural diversity are sort of bonded together because the division between culture and nature is man-made. When biological diversity is affected, there is also an erosion of forms of being together, social practices, and conditions of living culture.
What an interesting observation. Was this thought part of the project from the beginning? In what way has the project changed over the years?
It has been a long path. I have come to start thinking about the land, and the territory, especially at sites of extraction in the global South, Chile and Mexico, as places to learn from. Before this, I needed to understand how the territory can be knowledgeable, like a teacher – or how the land is full of knowledge already. In the beginning, I focused on how Amerindian cultures think about animals and plants. I have a long apprenticeship with indigenous teachers. I've learned to see the territory not as an object, not a natural resource; rather, I have learned how to relate to it differently.
Deconstructing knowledge production is a crucial element in your research. What does it entail?
It is less about deconstructing. I am trying to promote the emergence of an ecology of forms of knowing. We can question existing forms of knowledge and the variety of knowledge that is available per default. Let's say «we know» that water is a natural resource called H2O. Still, we can approach other forms of knowing water and different ways of understanding it, other ways of being with water and experiencing water in order to feel its importance.
Deconstructing, however, is a modern colonial move, it is part of the tradition of whiteness. We construct and then deconstruct. But the traditions I use as references, Amerindian traditions of knowledge and practice, do not operate in these terms of new and old. Therefore, they do not need to deconstruct what exists in order to create «the new». They think more in terms of ancestry: indigenous knowledge is ancestral knowledge. In a way, it is a knowledge that goes far back in history and is concerned with a mode of relation that does not produce the destruction of the Earth. I think it is important to start using those forms of thought and practice as references to transform the way we think and, eventually, the way we live…
You describe «Mountains in Resistance – School of Mountains and Water» – which you will be showing at this year’s Theater Spektakel – as a school of unlearning the «modern» or colonial idea of humans as «pre-existent beings». What do you mean by this?
There is this idea in Europe that you exist as being the master of others, and that you don't need anyone or anything else. You are not in reciprocity with a mountain, or with water, but you can consume stuff without giving anything back. This is a very exotic concept, even though today it is widespread, and it is totally linked with capitalist thinking.
In Zurich, for example: Do people living here think of themselves as being sustained by the waters of the glaciers that are close to them? Do they think of their bodies as being made of those waters? I understood that what indigenous elders were saying was true, our ancestors are not only human. One's bones are made of the bones of other beings, creatures from the sea, from the forest and ocean that once existed. The thought of being independent rather than being in relation to the bodies of water and forests around us is rather funny, because we depend on all other forms of life. Keeping this knowledge of interdependence and reciprocity in the indigenous traditions in mind, there are forms of remembering these ancestral relations that form our bodies and bring us here into this room, into this conversation, into this moment.
Can you tell us more about the concept behind «Mountains in Resistance – The School of Mountains and Water»?
You begin to consider these issues when you see the possibility of mountains no longer existing. For instance, in Santiago, Chile, there has been a massive drought for many years, and the desert is expanding. The central area, where the capital city of Santiago is located, will eventually become a desert.
Also, there are mining projects that are contributing to the melting of glaciers. Notably, Santiago, Chile, and Zurich, Switzerland – one in the Andes and the other in the Alps – rely on those glaciers. Climate change raises questions as the melting of these ice caps could result in significant amounts of water loss. In a way, this situation parallels the themes of the project «Mountains and Resistance». I wanted to bring different mountains together and think of mountains from the perspectives of the bodies of these mountains.
You think about mountains as living bodies. What do you mean by mountains being living bodies? In which ways can mountains help us unlearning things?
Mountains are living bodies. Strangely, we learn in modern colonial thinking – in school or university – the only ones having bodies are humans, animals, and maybe we use the term «bodies of water». But what about the bodies of mountains and their complex systems that produce water as life? How do their technologies work? Living technologies that somehow produce the possibility of life to exist, the possibility of us being here. And we know so little about their knowledge because we have been thinking of them as material, as landscape, as objects. During my apprenticeship with Amerindian teachers, I learned about the traditions of oral knowledge. They don't think of mountains as material but rather as living bodies, as beings with intentionality. They speak other languages and see with different eyes, but they are there to relate to and not only to be taken from.
You say that a connection of care between human bodies and bodies of mountains is required – how can we (re)build this connection?
When you think about writer and activist Gloria Anzaldúa's perspective, culture is about creating a world. Our habits shape the world we live in. So, if we keep understanding mountains as resources or tourist attractions, that is the world we will continue to create.
But if we practice understanding mountains as bodies, as others, as beings with whom we are in relation, we are going to change the way in which we inhabit the world. It might be too late. But it might be worth trying. I try to practice that through performance and ritual. I was reading a text by writer and scholar Sara Ahmed this morning, in which she talks about whiteness as a habit. A bad habit. But also, she talks about it in terms of orientation. Culture is so important because it can produce and be practiced. It can practice other forms of being in the world.
Your projects are traveling around the world. This summer, you are showing «Mountains in Resistance – School of Mountains and Water» with a view of the Swiss Alps. To what extent do you adapt your works depending on the specific location? Is there a difference between looking at the Alps and looking at the Andes?
If we think of the Swiss Alps, not as a place of tourism, nor as geology, a natural resource, a nationality, but if we look at them as bodies that are entangled in the production of water, this entanglement goes beyond Switzerland. Then we can encounter mountains, rivers, estuaries and glaciers as other inhabitants who know how to keep this fantastic balance of life we are now losing. So, the question of the project is – what will happen with climate change in these places? What are the prognoses? How can we adapt, or not? But also, whose climate change is this, if we know that 100 corporations produce 70% of the global carbon emissions. We are all going to pay for their profits with our futures.
Also, I imagine countries will look very differently in the future if we start thinking about what is possible to nurture life. They will be more like agro-ecological units, related to the land and the capacities of bodies of mountains, water, forests and ice-oceans to host life in order for life to continue. The cycle of water that feeds the people in Zurich is much broader than Switzerland. It goes from the ocean to the mountain and from the mountain to the ocean again. So, the tendency of hiding in your own country won’t be so useful for dealing with climate change: If we look at the land as a teacher, we can learn that what happens in the Andes directly concerns the Alps.
Amanda Piña presents her work «Mountains in Resistance - The School of Mountains and Water» at the Zürcher Theater Spektakel 2023.