en bora

* ongoing

(2015)

“We came to learn the songs and myths to heal. Then the grandfather said: Grandchildren, you will be able to learn and, without a doubt, I will teach you everything, from the beginning to the end.”

From “The Origin of the Coca Plant,” a myth transmitted within Aladino Mimico’s clan and written down by him in Spanish.

I met Aladino Mimico in the Peruvian Amazon in 2015. I had gone there interested in Indigenous spirituality and in ways of living that challenged much of what I had learned to consider natural or inevitable. I did not know that I would continue photographing him for more than a decade, or that the project would eventually become inseparable from the relationship between us.

Aladino is Bora and a shaman. For years I photographed him near Pebas, surrounded by his family, plants, animals, myths and beings whose presence belongs to an order of reality different from mine. His father was also a shaman, and much of the knowledge Aladino carries reached him through previous generations of his clan. Today he no longer lives where I first met him. His family has changed, some of his children have left home, and the life contained in my earliest photographs has quietly become another life.

Aladino has never fitted comfortably inside the image of “the shaman.” He drinks, jokes, doubts, becomes ill, contradicts himself. There is something sacred in his position, but nothing pure about his life. Over time, this contradiction became more important to me than the archetype.

Coca lies at the centre of both his practice and the myths transmitted within his clan. Iííbíí pííve tiná ume — the origin of coca — tells how Abuelo teaches the first people to plant, prepare and consume the leaf. Coca makes communication and healing possible, but its power carries a warning: knowledge and danger are inseparable, and the plant demands respect from those who use it.

“Do not despair when something happens to you. I will be looking after you until you exist in this world.”

From “The Origin of the Coca Plant.”

For Aladino, this ambivalence eventually became physical. His practice as a shaman involves consuming large quantities of coca, and after years of heavy use he became seriously ill. He had to leave the forest and enter a hospital, where surgery saved his life and left a large scar across his abdomen.

What followed was not simply a confrontation between shamanism and Western medicine. It was a more intimate dilemma. Continuing as a shaman meant maintaining a relationship with a plant that had become dangerous to his own body; abandoning it meant stepping away from knowledge, responsibilities and a way of being transmitted to him through generations.

I photographed the scar several times. It offered an almost irresistible metaphor, but Aladino refused to make it simple. The hospital did not erase the spirits he speaks to, just as the spirits did not make surgery unnecessary. What remained was a man forced to negotiate, within his own body, between the life he had inherited and the possibility of another one.

It was through contradictions like this that Eduardo Viveiros de Castro’s Amerindian perspectivism became important to the way I understood the project. The shaman is not simply a religious figure or healer. He occupies a position from which different worlds and points of view can be negotiated. In Western terms, he may resemble at different moments a healer, historian, diplomat or philosopher, although none of these categories is sufficient. What matters is his ability to enter into relations with beings and perspectives that do not obey the same divisions between human, animal, spirit and environment through which I had learned to organize the world.

This tension also brought me closer to The Falling Sky, the book created through the long relationship between Yanomami shaman Davi Kopenawa and anthropologist Bruce Albert. Aladino is Bora and Kopenawa is Yanomami; their peoples and cosmologies cannot be treated as interchangeable. What interests me is the reversal the book produces. Kopenawa is not simply someone whose world must be explained to Western readers. From his position, our own world — its commodities, extraction, accumulation and certainty about progress — also becomes strange.

With Aladino, I became wary of the familiar image of the Indigenous “guardian of the forest.” It sounds respectful, but it easily turns a person into a role. What draws me to him lies elsewhere: in a way of seeing from within the Amazon, where bodies, plants, illness, ancestors, animals and territory remain connected in ways that do not fit comfortably within the distinctions I arrived with.

Many of the myths Aladino received through his clan have been written down by him in Spanish. They do not represent Bora cosmology as a whole, nor can they speak for the entire Bora people. Their specificity matters. A myth is not simply an account of something that happened long ago; it establishes relations, explains transformations, organizes dangers and possibilities. As these myths pass between generations, from speech into writing and sometimes between languages, they change without necessarily ceasing to carry the world from which they came.

The photographs made since 2015 now belong to different moments of Aladino’s life. Places have changed, people have left, and some images no longer mean what they once did to me. Returning now would not be an attempt to continue the same series, but to photograph from the distance that time has created between those images and the life Aladino lives today.

En Bora remains centred on Aladino, but also on the distance that persists between us after years of proximity. His myths, his voice and my photographs do not always explain one another, and I prefer that they do not. After more than a decade, Aladino has become more familiar to me without becoming easier to understand. That unresolved space is where the project continues.