Swimming with Magatdä, 2023 - ongoing
For the Ngäbe, Panama’s largest Indigenous group, water is origin and memory, a sacred force connecting communities to ancestors and the land. Ngäbe cosmology tells of Magatdä, the great serpent who shaped the world through rivers and mountains, embodying both creation and destruction. As both creator and destroyer, Magatdä embodies the dual force of water itself: it gives life, carves landscapes, and sustains memory, yet it can also flood, erase, and transform.
The Ngäbe live in one of the most remote and marginalized regions of the country, with limited access to healthcare, education, and infrastructure. This isolation amplifies their vulnerability as global demand for copper and hydroelectric power pushes development into their territory. Cerro Colorado, one of the world’s largest underdeveloped copper deposits, lies deep within Ngäbe lands; its exploration was halted in 2012 after sustained Indigenous protests, yet pressure to exploit it persists. Barro Blanco, one of Panama’s most controversial hydroelectric projects, flooded sacred valleys without consulting the communities affected. Panama has not ratified ILO Convention 169, leaving Indigenous peoples without guaranteed rights to free, prior, and informed consent.
Swimming with Magatdä examines the collision between a worldview rooted in reciprocity with land and water and an extractive economy driven by global demand. At the same time, the project moves with the current of Ngäbe resistance and renewal. It traces gestures of self-determination, small, persistent, and collective, through which communities reclaim agency over their land and future. Like Magatdä, these forces hold both rupture and creation: they resist erasure while shaping new paths forward. In this space between loss and possibility, water remains: carrying memory, sustaining life, and insisting on continuity.
