Eliana Otta

»Virtual Sanctuary for Fertilizing Mourning« was created with the intention of commemorating the deaths of indigenous leaders and environmental activists assassinated in recent years in Peru, while defending their territories from deforestation, mining, and drug trafficking.

Over the course of a year and a half, we worked together with their families and communities to create virtual tours of the areas they strove to protect, now hosted in a website called Luto Verde. Every tour is different, trying to reflect each community’s own universe, uniquely shaped by its territory, collective activities, and more-than-human bonds. Oral histories, remembrance, songs, and all the information that the communities found suitable to share, were used to develop portals into ways of life that are now threatened, but also to convey the invisible and affectionate threads sustaining them. The recorded material additionally shows the effects of extractivism and corruption in places where nature is treated merely as an infinite source of resources and profit. Besides the website, Virtual Sanctuary for Fertilizing Mourning is constituted by its research activities, texts about its work with the different communities, sound pieces, drawings, and a site-specific installation at the Berlin venue silent green.

This project has emerged from the conviction that remembering the deceased can be a way to learn from and defend the precious territories and cultures to which they belonged. Getting to know their communities, even from afar, will hopefully highlight the important daily battles they face in defense of the Amazon under the most precarious circumstances. By mourning the lives of Mauro Pío, Gonzalo Pío, Arbildo Meléndez, Yenes Ríos, Herasmo García, and Santiago Vega, we aim to help fertilize the grounds for the ways of living they defended.