Victor Mendoza
Casaluzfilms
The content of this news item has been machine translated and may contain some inaccuracies with respect to the original content published in Spanish.
Kené is a Shipibo-Konibo practice that consists of creating designs following geometric patterns, which represent rivers, roads, songs, their history and signify connection. This is the idea behind Kené Connectionsan interactive documentary that won the National New Media Film Competition produced by Casaluzfilms and directed by Rodolfo Arrascue, professor of the Academic Department of Art and Design, and graduate of the Masters in Visual Anthropology PUCP.
Kené Conexiones tells the stories of Olga Mori and Olinda Silvano, two Shipibo-Konibo women and mothers, their experience as kené makers and their journey from Lima to Ucayali. Through conventional audiovisual recording, 360° video and virtual reality, the interactive documentary(i-doc) explores the spaces in which the kené is produced and inhabited. This tour allows the user to approach issues such as identity, tradition, representation and migration of the Shipibo-Konibo people.
Arrascue, who is a filmmaker dedicated to the production of Amazonian cinema, got to know Kené during his trips to the jungle. The filmmaker comments that the project began as part of his work in the Master's program in Visual Anthropology at the PUCP. "I began to investigate the process of adapting the kené to new formats such as the murals that were made in the city of Lima," he says.
Likewise, the director, who is a member of the Peruvian Amazon Filmmakers Association (Acape), points out that the migration of the Shipibo-Konibo people to Lima was a point of interest and exploration for the production of the documentary. Thus, Arrascue began to investigate the empowerment and the processes of production and circulation of the Kené in Lima. This process led him to develop a research and the production of the anthropological documentary Diseños de identidad, universos del kené, as part of the Master's Degree in Visual Anthropology.
Art and Design Academic Department Teacher
The documentary has approximately 140 minutes of video material and 46 minutes of virtual reality, through which we sought to generate an immersive relationship between the user and the places, spaces, transits, rituals and customs of its protagonists and their communities. "In the i-doc tour, you can start from the city or the jungle, and everything is correlated between them," says Arrascue, "We hope that these interrelationships allow the user to link and reflect on these ways of experiencing and producing kené," he adds.
"It is necessary to start thinking about interaction from these new supports. In the case of the Kené, we conceptualized the idea of weaving and how the community takes the figures of roads, rivers and connections," Arrascue points out. Finally, the documentary filmmaker mentions that this process of inquiry influenced the project's final proposal. "Our intention was to link technologies to the archive, to culture and to the material and immaterial heritage of Peru," he adds.
While Kené Conexiones has been part of Chiledoc 2018 and Ventana Sur's Virtuality festival in Argentina 2020, the dissemination of the i-doc continues. "We want to continue and implement an installation plan in museums and festivals. Also, to see the possibility of taking the documentary to the Amazon," comments Arrascue. On the other hand, the filmmaker is currently working on his next feature films: Ino Moxo Pantera Negra, El viaje al origen del kené; and La Virgen de Samiria, a film adaptation of the novel of the same name by Amazonian writer Roger Rumrrill.