The Forest knows
Cortona On The Move photography exhibition, realised by OTM Company in collaboration with Aboca and Fondazione Guglielmo Giordano.
Project by Nicoló Lanfranchi & Davilson Brasileiro, images Nicoló Lanfranchi, curatorship by Paolo Woods.
The Forest Knows is a true tale hidden in the forest.
In 1993, the visionary Indigenous leader Benki Piyãko founded the Apiwtxa association, named after the village he and his small community had built. Piyãko, a member of the Asháninka people, one of South America’s largest tribes, had designed a plan for sustainable development that has become widely influential in the decades since. After a struggle that began with the approval of a new Constitution in Brazil in 1988 that guaranteed the rights of indigenous peoples, the Asháninka community was granted legal title to approximately 870 square kilometres of partially degraded forest along the Amônia River in Brazil in 1992. Since then, an astonishing transformation has begun.
The way of life in the village is based on reforestation and agroforestry. It is sustainable and largely self-sufficient, maintained and protected by cultural empowerment, Indigenous spirituality and resistance to encroachment from the outside world.
The villagers and Piyãko have planted more than 2m trees and fight to preserve their land and culture. Piyãko has involved international organisations, Hollywood stars and ordinary citizens to support this mission. His work, with that of his community, has made it possible to transform once-devastated land into a lush forest and to help the village of Apiwtxa achieve food security and autonomy while maintaining a balance between the Asháninka lifestyle and culture, and modernity.
The Asháninka are a living example of how to respect the forest. Apiwtxa, meaning “unity”, is both the name of the village and a word sacred to the Asháninka, denoting the importance of collective over individual interests – one of the basic principles of community governance. The Asháninka are an ancient warrior people from the Andes who settled in the Amazon rainforest and became military and trading partners of the Incas, selling forest treasures such as jaguar skins and bird feathers. They were never subjugated, even by the Spanish, and were therefore considered invincible warriors.
Apiwtxa village was built on the banks of the Amônia River on two former pastures of about 40 hectares (100 acres). It is an isolated location and they have to travel several hours by boat to reach the nearest city. However, they maintain close links with Asháninka communities in Peru, where most of these Indigenous people (numbering about 60,000) live.
The Asháninka reject the idea that humanity is separate from nature and that the latter is subject to the former. For them, plants, trees, animals, birds, mountains, waterfalls and rivers can speak, feel and think and are related to other beings in reciprocal relationships. The psychedelic decoction made from some Amazonian plants capable of inducing a visionary effect called ayahuasca (the plant Banisteriopsis caapi that the Asháninka call kamarãpi) taught them about the intimate connections between beings on earth.
The rituals help people develop their consciousness, guiding them towards self-knowledge and gradually towards a deeper knowledge of other people and beings. The life plans of the inhabitants of Apiwtxa, drawn from shamanic visions and shaped by interactions with the non-indigenous world, are based on the protection and nurturing of all life in their territory.
The inhabitants of Apiwtxa speak little, they observe with a gaze that seems to peer into the folds of the soul, they almost never ask questions, they live in a time marked by the cycle of the seasons, of day and night, of light and darkness. Since childhood, accustomed to silence, to waiting, to observation, they listen to dreams and the world of the spirit, they know how to dive into the unconscious to come up with answers.