Text by Manuel Beinat
All Images © Eléonore Lubna and Louis Matton
Eléonore Lubna (1989. Paris, France) and Louis Matton (1989. Paris, France) both live and work in Paris, France. Eléonore graduated from the Institut Saint-Luc (Tournai, Belgium) in 2013 and from the Ecole Nationale Supérieure de la Photographie in 2016 (Arles, France). Louis, after a degree in sociology at the Sorbonne (Paris, France), entered the Ecole Nationale Supérieure de la Photographie (Arles, France) where he graduated in 2015. They’ve been working together since 2016.
Ipáamamu – Stories of Wawaim is their first duo project: it’s based on German director Werner Herzog’s artistic misadventure, the movie Fitzcarraldo (1982), and talks about how an indigenous South American community situated in the hamlet of Wawaim, the Awajún, resisted the encroachments of an unwieldy and dangerous film production that would have unearthed one of the community’s most traumatic historical events. Those who have seen the movie probably know that the actions of the main character are inspired by a true story, much more problematic than the one portrayed on the screen. Originally, the rubber baron Fitzcarrald organized a complex transportation system to lift a steamboat over a mountain to speed up the transport time of the Cauchu. This was accomplished by exploiting the natives, who were reduced to a system of slavery. But in Herzog’s film there is no mention of forced labor of any kind: everything is justified by the dream of the protagonist, who exploits the beliefs of the natives – who worshipped a white god – for his own purposes, giving the public another stereotypical version of the native people. Plus, Herzog
tried to impose his project with false information and by introducing technologies and tools (cameras and film equipment) that the community had never seen before.
“We thought it would be interesting to revisit this story, which concerns us as Europeans and as artists. Why did the village revolt? Why did Herzog seem so keen to film on this land? At what cost?” says Eléonore.
In this context, the camera takes on a dual role: on the one hand, the German filmmaker attempts – as the colonialist tradition has taught the West – to appropriate a country and its people in order to pursue his ambitions. On the other hand, there is the witnessing of the Awajuns’ resistance activities in the ‘70s against Herzog throughout the camera. This latter body of images dialogues with the photographs taken by Eléonore and Louis, which depict the daily life of the Awajuns, their constant attempts at self-determination, and their commitment to preserving the history and culture of the community.
Photography, in the journalistic tradition, has always been a close ally of social struggle.
When one thinks of a situation of evasion, exploitation, or oppression, images give visibility to those pockets of resistance that are ready to demonstrate or take to the streets to fight for their rights.
Louis and Eléonore’s work, however, helps to modernize a decades-old type of iconographic tradition. Our eyes are not accustomed to seeing as “resistance” even the most trivial and obvious social practices, such as working the land, cooking, moments of conviviality.
Ipáamamu – Stories of Wawaim puts this authenticity in dialogue with a series of scenes photographed during the legal battle with Herzog, showing meetings and assemblies, moments of self-management and grassroots organization that helped develop a strong anti-colonial class consciousness (the ipáamamu is in fact an Awajún concept that refers to an invitation to a group of people to carry out a specific project).
Everyday life becomes political through photography.
What emerges from the duo project is the capacity of images to build multiple bridges: both relational and temporal. It also shows how the camera manages to transform itself from an instrument of extraction into a pretext for a healthy and positive dialogue between cultures, without any kind of white saviorism.
Ipáamamu – Stories of Wawaim is in fact a new type of reportage. The framework within which it’s photographed is horizontal and collaborative: the attitude (of method, of tools, of research) adopted by the authors is based on a dialogue that leads to a historical and cultural recognition. There is no violence or extractivism, just the desire to tell about the others after a collective trauma that questions art itself.
Indeed, the nature of colonialism is not only economic or political. It is, in fact, a complex ideological system that pervades all spheres of cultural and artistic production and seeks to impose its own “way of seeing”, to quote the British critic John Berger. Herzog’s was an attempt (a successful one, anyway, since the movie was shot in another part of the Andes) with a strong colonialist bias. Instead, Louis and Eléonore’s work helps us reflect on the role of images, which are never innocent or divorced from their context of production.
Photographs also help to reproduce subtle dynamics of control and power. And the camera, understood as a neutral and functional tool for unbiased storytelling, is a just a legend of the twentieth century.
Ipáamamu – Stories of Wawaim forgets this impartial attitude and helps viewers (and other artists and photographers) answer one of the great questions of contemporary photography about the representation of otherness: the decolonization of the gaze through a historically violent and objectifying instrument.
Recontextualizing what is seen becomes one of the many goals of the project. The work of the French artists helps us to reconsider the role of the “native” as a person removed from industrialized society, now understood as an actively responsive individual capable of producing counter-narratives, whose storytelling is facilitated by photography. It also helps us to critically re-read a work that is considered a masterpiece of filmmaking, and reminds us that we must always examine the nature of images: where did they come from?
Who shot it and when? What was left out of the frame?
In this way, the project reminds us to focus our attention not only on the product, but also on the artistic process, which today has to move away from the white documentary reporter’s notion of “giving voice” to minorities, and must consider subaltern groups as autonomous and capable of telling their own stories. The problem is not “to give voice to”, but to “listen to” those voices.
This is all thanks to a body of images that, whether it is the legal battles of ’79 or the photos of the pottery workshop organized by the community in recent years, always portrays the Wawaim community in the most dignified way.
