all that goes into this / nokemake / por eso el cuento coincide

We must consider that life is a listening experience. One can agree that in nature and amongst all Indigenous cultures, the act of listening is fundamental to their very livelihood- an instinctual, spiritual and participatory act. ‘Nokemake’ is the Matsigenka word to express that “I am hearing” or “I have heard,” and so we as listeners, to be able to experience this deep relationship (through sound) provides a necessary part of our fundamental understanding of what connects a people to a place - a veritable confluence of worlds.

For this CTF series #08, we invited sound artist Vered Engelhard to listen, share, and record the sonically charged landscape of the Matsigenka people in their community of Shipetiari located in the Manu Biosphere Reserve in the Peruvian Amazon. As artist Vered Engelhard comments: “...the necessity of understanding the different perspectives between humans and animals in simultaneity and coexistence…” is part and parcel of their creative methodology in working with sound. Through this composition, they intend to create a fluidity between the many participants who through their hands, eyes, voices, and ears guide us through their own listening and recording journey using the artist’s digital devices. We hope that this work will ignite you, within the silence of your own mind, to bear witness as we do to the natural and elemental richness that is endemic to the Matsigenka web of life today.

To learn more about this work visit: www.xapiriground.org/work/crafting-the-field-vered-engelhard

Hear more works from this artist: veredengelhard.bandcamp.com

Vered Engelhard is a Peruvian artist and researcher, whose practice develops from the territory. They are active with the Asociación de Siembra y Cosecha de Agua (ASYCA), dedicated to the community design of water stewardship projects in the Peruvian Andes. They research how Andean-Amazonian ancestral technologies unfold territorial cultures tied to community organizing and struggles for water and land. They work the soundscape from performance, with expanded techniques of field recordings and participatory sound designs towards poetic and socio environmental justice. They have led workshops on the ethical and technical possibilities of field recordings as active interventions in the territory, along with undergraduate courses on decolonization and feminist ecologies at Columbia University (New York City), where they are a doctoral candidate in Latin American Cultural Studies. In their musical project ‘Canto Villano’ they structure performances with recordings guided by the water (yakumama) as master, weaving sonorities that honor the territory and its history with stone percussion, song, and pututo (conch shell trumpet).

*All field recordings were captured during the last week of March 2023 by Vered Engelhard and various individuals in the native community of Shipetiari in the Manu district of the Madre de Dios region. We thank all the Matsigenka people for sharing their time with us and to Vered for this important work in connecting with the Matsigenka culture and the work of Xapiri Ground.