ancestral

In September 2024, 2024 Impact Awardee Rosa Chávez and Brazilian multidisciplinary artist, teacher, and researcher Gabriela Luz met during “Art for Climate Justice — Reimagining Sustainable Futures”, a programme by the Prince Claus Fund in collaboration with the Open Society Foundations. Taking place in Belém do Pará, Brazil, the week-long event created spaces for exchanges, connections, and inspirations that explore alternative solutions for the climate crisis rooted in artistic practices and ancestral knowledge.

Their exchange continued through “The Future is Ancestral”, a collaborative film-poem commissioned by Prince Claus Fund and presented by NOWNESS. Directed by Ecuadorian photographer and filmmaker Misha Vallejo Prut, the film brings together Rosa's poetry and Gabriela's performance to explore the ancestral ties that bind humans to the living world.

In this conversation with the Fund’s Programmes Manager Victoria Harari, Rosa and Gabriela reflect on ancestry, spirituality, territory, and the role of art and education in navigating contemporary crises. Together, they discuss how indigenous knowledge, collective memory, and artistic practice can challenge colonial systems, sustain hope, and help imagine more just and connected futures.

During the discussion session of “Recreating and re-imagining possible futures in the present tense”, we explored how art, culture, and non-hegemonic knowledge can shape more just and sustainable futures. Is there a thought from that exchange that has stayed with you recently?

Rosa: The dialogue and the process of creating the film-poem carried a radical spirit of transformation. Gabriela and I not only place our bodies at the centre of the work, but we also come together with the entire ancestral collective of our people and the responsibilities of our territories. It was a reminder that while some borders are physical, many others are imposed to keep us apart and prevent us from understanding one another.

My intention with the piece was also to affirm the importance of this connection. In a world marked by growing complexity and uncertainty, I believe it is vital that our hearts continue to blossom in relation.

When fear threatens to take away our hope, we should reconnect with the life that continues to exist around us and beyond us and collectively hold on to hope.

Gabriela: Yes, one of the most meaningful things I have taken from this experience is this deep sense of connection. As Rosa said, ancestry has no borders. And just as nature does not recognise the boundaries we create among each other, it blossoms in its diversity. What I really want to highlight here, and through the movie, is how differences can and should strengthen us rather than separate us.

The film we created, having Rosa's poem as the starting point, has inspired me to connect with many other indigenous people who, like me, face challenges in keeping our cultures and ways of relating to nature alive. Colonialism has long tried—and continues to try—to separate us from these connections. That is why the moments we shared in Belém, when so many artists and activists from different geographies of the Majority World came together, felt so important and continue to resonate with me today.

How does your ancestry shape who you are and your artistic practice today?

Gabriela: Colonialism has taught us to see ancestry as something that belongs only to the past, as if it were imprisoned there. As a result, many people think of ancestry as something that is gone or no longer relevant. But for us, ancestry shapes our understanding of who we are and guides us toward the future.

Like nature, ancestry is alive, constantly transforming, and teaching us about coexistence. Everything around us is nature, and we are an inseparable part of it too. Ancestry should be understood as a living force that continues to evolve.

This is why art and culture are so important. They are among the most powerful ways we can express and amplify our ancestry.

Ancestry is not always something tangible that can be easily explained. It is also a feeling, a relationship, and a way of being. Through art, we find ways to represent it, understand it, and connect with it.

Art is also important because it allows us to connect beyond words. Again, colonialism created many kinds of borders—through language, territory, governments, and social structures—and taught us to see our differences as problems that separate us. But according to our ancestry and our relationship with nature, our differences complement one another and make us stronger.

When we encounter people who are different from us, there can be moments of cultural shock. Yet I see that difference as something beautiful. If we remain open to one another, those encounters become opportunities for learning and connection that remind us of our shared humanity.

Rosa: I think conversations about spirituality in art and culture are especially important today. As more people search for alternatives to the paths that capitalism has led us down, there is growing interest in indigenous ways of understanding the world. While that can be valuable, we must be careful not to homogenise indigenous peoples, our identities, or our relationships with our territories. Our cultures and worldviews may intersect, but they are not all the same.

The knowledge passed down by our ancestors, spiritual guides, and communities offers different ways of relating to the world—ways that are often deeply critical of capitalism and extractivism. At the same time, we need to resist the commodification, exoticisation, and folklorisation of indigenous spiritual practices. Spirituality is not a product. It is a relationship that connects us to essential elements of life, beginning with the earth itself.

Like Gabriela said, Mother Earth is not something distant or separate from us.

Nature is where our feet are planted—whether in cities, forests, mountains, or fields.

Colonial and capitalist systems encourage us to think of nature as something outside ourselves, but nature is already here. It is our bodies. It is who we are. We are part of the fabric of life, and spirituality helps us remember our place within that larger web of relationships.

Spirituality also invites us to ask difficult questions. Are we listening to the call of our own spirituality? Are we willing to engage with the histories carried by our territories, our communities, and our bodies? Sometimes these encounters are uncomfortable because they confront us with difficult truths, but that discomfort can be valuable. It encourages a conscious and critical presence in the world. For indigenous peoples, spirituality opens the possibility of telling our own stories in our own voices, rather than having them interpreted through external frameworks.

In these urgent and challenging times, I believe in the transformative power of spirituality. It helps us live with integrity despite oppression and uncertainty. Mother Earth is present in our homes, our altars, our prayers, our marches, and our collective movements. Spirituality is also present in the memory of past struggles and rebellions. That, too, is spirituality.

Today, spirituality is often packaged as a personal journey or even a commodity. How do you see this trend, and how does it differ from the collective and political understandings of spirituality that you are describing?

Gabriela: Spirituality cannot be separated from territory. Capitalism has found ways to appropriate spiritual practices, indigenous knowledge, alternative medicines quite often detaching them from the territories and communities that give them meaning. When that happens, spirituality becomes another form of extraction.

At the same time, indigenous peoples in many parts of Latin America have gained greater visibility and political recognition. But visibility alone is not enough. We must remember that what happened in our territories. Acknowledging that history is essential if we want to challenge the systems that continue to dispossess and exploit our communities. People and territory are inseparable, which is why many of the environmental and climate crises we face today are continuations of colonial processes.

Today, communities continue to organise, mobilise, and defend their territories. Spirituality is part of that resistance. It reminds us that we belong to our lands, our communities, and a larger web of life, giving us the strength to confront oppression while crafting our own futures.

Rosa: I deeply connect with what you're saying, Gabriela. Thank you for your powerful reflection.

Both of you are art educators, and pedagogy is an important part of your artistic practice. How do you approach the role of artists and cultural workers?

Gabriela: I have been reflecting on the tensions and possibilities between ancestral knowledge and contemporary life, and how they shape our artistic practices. My artistic practice helps me to make those tensions visible and create spaces for critical reflection.

We are living people with centuries of existence, contradictions, and complexities. In my own work, navigating these different temporalities is a process of understanding who I am, reconnecting with my history, and healing the wounds of colonial trauma.

I often think about our grandmothers and grandfathers, who lived through incredibly difficult times and still found ways to maintain and recreate life and knowledge. That is why we are here today, and now we continue their work. Also, our ancestors are not only human beings, they are also the rivers, the earth, the air we breathe, and everything that coexists with us.

The ancestral future is not something distant. Historical memory is now. Our purpose is now. Our ancestors not only guided us, they envisioned us.

Even amid the crises of capitalism that seek to disconnect us from one another and from the world around us, we are already living that ancestral future today.

Rosa: Education is not simply about teaching. It is about creating spaces where people feel safe enough to speak, listen, and connect with one another, as a deeply counter-colonial practice because it challenges the idea that knowledge only comes from institutions or authority figures.

Artistic practice begins and ends with listening and relationship-building. Every encounter with a work of art requires us to bring our own memories, experiences, and perspectives. Meaning is created through that exchange, through the ways we connect our individual histories to what we are experiencing in the present.

When I work with students, I often find that they already know what they are doing, even if they do not yet have the language to describe it. A large part of my role is helping them recognise the knowledge they already carry, understand its value, and make sense of their own creative processes. At the same time, I learn from them as much as they learn from me.

Education and art are spaces of possibility. Through listening, dialogue, and shared reflection, we can reinterpret our experiences, create new meanings, and imagine different ways of being in the world.

Interview transcription and editing by Dzikri Sabillah Anwar, Communications Intern at the Prince Claus Fund.