Video Amazon Collage

I created this stop motion collage after the Bolivian fires. It shows an Amazonian figure, then flames rise until everything disappears into a blank screen.

While working on my book Who Lives in the Bolivian Amazon? I was struck by how many Indigenous groups remain unknown, even within Bolivia. The fires only deepened this sense of fragility. Entire ways of life at risk of vanishing without record, without legacy. Some of these peoples trace back to prehistoric times, yet their stories are on the edge of silence.

The video became a meditation on erasure. How easily cultures, like ecosystems, can be wiped out. If no one remembers them, did they ever truly exist in the eyes of the world? My hope was that by documenting and sharing their presence, even briefly, I could resist that silence.