Swimming with Magatdä

In the organizer's words:

For the Ngäbe, Panama's largest Indigenous group, water is origin and memory, a sacred force that connects communities to ancestors and land. The Ngäbe live in the Ngäbe-Buglé Comarca, an Indigenous autonomous territory in western Panama, where rivers, mountains, and forests remain deeply embedded in spiritual and everyday life. In Ngäbe cosmology, Magatdä, the great serpent, shaped the world through rivers and mountains. As both creator and destroyer, Magatdä embodies the nature of water itself: a force that gives life, transforms landscapes, and carries memory across generations.

Swimming with Magatdä is a visual exploration of the contemporary reality of the Ngäbe people through their relationship with the natural world. The project unfolds through encounters with people and places across the comarca. In Soloy, I follow the work of Wilfredo Mitre, cultural organizer and founder of an ethno-tourism fair that creates space for community-led preservation and exchange. In Peña Blanca, I spend time with the Zurdo family, who live beside the sacred mountain and maintain a close relationship with the spiritual geography of the land. At Klosay, on the Caribbean side of the comarca, and at Cascada Kiki, the project traces how waterfalls, mountains, and forests continue to hold cultural, ancestral, and communal meaning.

This work is an archive in progress, a visual chronicle of presence, memory, and continuity. It looks at the Ngäbe not only through hardship, but through knowledge, care, and their enduring role as guardians of some of Panama's most vital ecological and spiritual landscapes.