Turminta, lo que las tormentas saben is a transdisciplinary co-creation project developed with Kichwa communities in Ecuador. Through a relational ontology, it explores more-than-human connections with storms and atmospheric phenomena.

• Residency: Human and more than human interculturality in the Ecuadorian Andes

Peasant and indigenous territories are spaces of resistance and intercultural becoming – human and more than human – in the midst of the eco-social crisis of capitalism. From rurality and memory we can imagine and create other ways of feeling and inhabiting the world.

• Project

Using sound art, sensitive technologies, and speculative devices, the project activates vernacular knowledge that understands thunder, water, clouds, and storms as living, communicative beings, connecting Kichwa communities from the Andean paramo to the Amazon rainforest.

By connecting territories through the shared flow of water, it weaves together cosmologies, languages, and collective memories, fostering an ethic of care against extractivist logics that threaten ecosystems and ancestral ways of life. During a residency at Centro Intercultural Comunitario Tránsito Amaguaña, the artist developed practices of attentive listening and observation with the community of La Chimba. The observation of skies, cloud formations, the movement of the sun, cumulonimbus clouds, and the arrival, or absence, of the agüitas became the epistemological basis of her work. This knowledge is articulated through the principles of Sumak Kawsay and the relationship between Hanan Pacha (the above, the clouds) and Uku Pacha (the below, the earth), sustaining balance between rainforest and paramos.

Lorena performs a live sound piece composed from field recordings made with analogue tape and handmade underwater and electromagnetic microphones in La Chimba and the Amazon rainforest. These recordings are combined with real-time sound manipulation, noise, conversations with community elders, sound diaries, and data from a handmade weather station. The piece becomes an immersive journey through the voices and sounds of storms, exploring hydric thought and atmospheric intelligences between human and more-than-human bodies.

The project also incorporates microscopic studies of rain, snow, hail, mist, and river water to reveal the microorganisms inhabiting these hydric bodies. The resulting microscopic imagery is presented in dialogue with a visual cloud diary developed  during the residency, generating a live visual ecosystem that unfolds and is activated in real time during the sound performance.

• Artist

Lorena Salas is a visual anthropologist, sociologist, filmmaker and cultural manager whose work lies at the intersection of art, research and activism. She focuses her work on collaborative, transdisciplinary and intersectional processes for creating critical, experimental visual and sound-based narratives.

She has worked with Amazonian, rural and migrant communities for over a decade, developing collective processes of self-representation and artistic co-creation as strategies to resist systemic violence, displacement and extractivist logics. She has collaborated with local and regional organisations to create spaces for theoretical and practical exchange around territorially grounded artistic practices.

She is currently the director of Sacha Manchi (2014), a project dedicated to researching and experimenting with collaborative practices within communities whose rights are severely violated. Since 2019, she has also directed the community film project De Cámaras a Camaradas.

• Host institution

The Centro Intercultural Comunitario Tránsito Amaguaña (Cayambe, Ecuador) is located in the indigenous Kayambi community of La Chimba, in the Andes of northern Ecuador, near the border with Colombia. The region is the cradle of the Ecuadorian indigenous movement, represented by leaders Dolores Cacuango and Tránsito Amaguaña. Communities administer their territories through assemblies and indigenous justice. Its main activity is livestock. Water is abundant thanks to the Cayambe snowfall, the only glacier in the world at the equator, and the moors. But since 1991 the glacier has lost 30% of its surface and is expected to disappear by 2080. The moors, with their black soil acting as a carbon sink, are threatened by agriculture and global warming. In 2024 the region was declared an Area of Conservation and Sustainable Use (ACUS), but there are strong tensions between ecological needs and agriculture, especially new flower farms.

• Translocal expert

Translocal experts are profiles that support artists during the residency, bringing relevant expert knowledge and anchoring projects firmly in the relevant regional context, demography and history, in particular with regard to the philosophies of Buen Vivir and Lo-TEK.

In this residency, the translocal expert is Pedro Soler, cultural agitator and curator. He was director of the Barcelona Hangar from 2006 to 2010. In the following years, he curated exhibitions in Spain, Egypt, Colombia, Mexico and Ecuador. Her most recent exhibitions are “Humano, Troppo Humano” at CAC Quito (2023) and Tinku Uku Pacha at La Chimba, Cayambe (2025). In 2024 he won the Mariano Aguilera National Award for Curatorial Practice.

• Credits

Artist: Lorena Salas

With the collaboration of: Jenny Campues and Karen Benalcázar (Centro Intercultural Comunitario Tránsito  Amaguaña, CICTA)

Twin: Centro Intercultural Comunitario Tránsito Amaguaña, CICTA (Ecuador) https://www.cicta.org/ 

Trans-local expert: Pedro Soler

Liaison mediator: tere badia

Partner: HacTe – Barcelona Hub of Art, Science and Technology (Spain) https://www.hactebcn.org/ 

This project is realized by Lorena Salas in the framework of S+T+ARTS Buen-TEK, co-funded by the European Union under the S+T+ARTS initiative of DG CNECT (GA LC- 03568052), and implemented during the residency “Human & more-than-human: interculturality in the Ecuadorian Andes” together with CICTA and HacTe.