Author(s): Šnajberková, Jaroslava ; Bidarra, José ; Tavares, Mirian
Date: 2025
Persistent ID: http://hdl.handle.net/10400.2/20530
Origin: Repositório Aberto da Universidade Aberta
Subject(s): Indigenous media; Digital ritual; Decolonial aesthetics; Visual sovereignty; Analogue photography; Kogi
This paper presents arts-based research on digital media and indigenous communities. It departs from Kogi sacred masks to discuss community life and how digital media can serve as a relational, ethically attuned environment for engaging with indigenous communities in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta in Colombia. Grounded in visual ethnography, autoethnography, and analogue photography, the project explores how image-making may shift from mere acts of capture to practices of co-presence, inner silence, and respectful withholding. The work draws from the story of two sacred ritual masks repatriated from Berlin to the Kogi in 2023, using them as both material artefacts and conceptual metaphors for opacity, sovereignty, and spiritual integrity. Through digital fragments, ambient sound, underexposed imagery, and poetic interruption, the digital arts project challenges conventional representation and contributes to a decolonial visual methodology rooted in care and attentiveness.
