Aswa, Archives and Memories with the Earth

A project by the Centro de Arte Contemporáneo de Quito in collaboration with La Nueva Fábrica, Guatemala.

Aswa was created as a platform for encounter, exchange, and shared research among artists, cultural workers, and researchers from Ecuador, Colombia, and Guatemala: Alfarera Colibrí / Silvia Etec; Colectiva Yama and Partera di Anaku, in alliance with the Consejo Indígena de Salud Ancestral Hamik Warmikuna and Escuela de Partería Ancestral Unanchu Mamakuna; Cristina Cardona Montoya; Bárbara Coroxon and Edizon Cumes of Proyecto Parutz’; Lorena Kab’nal and Tzk´at – Red de Sanadoras Ancestrales del Feminismo Comunitario Territorial desde Iximulew-Guatemala; Manai Kowii together with Alberto Lima and Pacha Alta; Maya Juracán and La Revuelta; and Yauri Muenala Vega.

Over the course of several months, the invited participants took part in a collective methodology grounded in conversation, listening, imagination, and a series of situated exchanges, reflecting on memory, territory, the body, pluriversal forms of knowledge, and the ways in which communities and collectives sustain life.

The project emerges from both cultural spaces’ commitment to process: like a ferment that works its way into the project’s premise and moves toward dialogue, placing at its center the different forms, practices, methodologies, and divergences through which the group engages with questions of social justice and memory. Rather than beginning with a fixed exhibition format, Aswa unfolds as a process of encounter—a space in which practices rooted in different territories come into proximity, allowing them to resonate with, question, and accompany one another.

This collaborative process continued through an in-person gathering in Quito, held from June 17 to 21, 2026, and articulated through internal exchanges, visits, and public programs. These days allowed participants to deepen their conversations, engage with local contexts and temporalities, and share aspects of their work with one another and with the public.

The traces of this process—its encounters, gestures, materials, questions, and resonances—are presented through an installation emerging from this collective process, open to the public from Thursday, July 16, at the Centro de Arte Contemporáneo de Quito, a public municipal cultural space located in the city’s historic center. Conceived as an archive in motion, the installation brings together elements of the methodology developed throughout the project while offering reflections on the participants’ own practices and on the exchanges that have shaped the process, which they hope will continue to be woven together as an unfolding narrative.