A text pathway — Reunión

A text pathway
Un Texto Camino

Territorio Wichí, Gran Chaco, 2020 to 2022.
Book: Download (in Spanish)
Bilingual Book Spanish - Wichí lam tës: Download
Audiobook in Wichí lam tës: Download / Youtube

Caístulo lives in Wichí indigenous territory, between the chaco and the yungas, in a community of homes of adobe and nylon, without electricity, next to a small mountain surrounded by razed land: monoculturing, cattle ranching, oil companies and dust. At eighty years old, at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, he fell into a coma in the monte. Eleven hours later he woke up and began to sing the messages transmitted to him by the mothers, what we call trees. It was the first time he sang. He never stopped.

We met four times between 2020 and 2022. We walked to the monte. He sang in wichí ihämtes, his mother tongue: we recorded. Then he spoke to me in his Spanish: I wrote what he said by hand. No recording. Every time he paused to inhale, I moved to the next line. We read it out loud and corrected it together. This book holds his voice, made writing through our encounters. There is an edition that circulates in wichí territory and another one that is distributed elsewhere.

Song-book in wichí lämtes: Download