Counter-Visualities of Care: Community Archives, Visual Culture, and Political Ecology in the Andean Páramos

Counter-Visualities of Care: Community Archives, Visual Culture, and Political Ecology in the Andean Páramos examines how community archives and visual practices of resistance intervene in the defense, care, and memory of the Andean páramos in Tolima (Colombia), Azuay (Ecuador), and Cajamarca (Peru). The project explores how images are produced, circulated, and contested within socio-environmental conflicts linked to extractivism, mining expansion, and ecological crisis.

Drawing from visual culture, political ecology, archival studies, and non-fiction audiovisual practices, the research analyzes how dominant visual regimes construct the páramo as an exploitable resource, while communities and socio-environmental movements generate counter-visualities that reimagine these territories as spaces of life, memory, and the commons. In this context, images are approached not merely as representations, but as political and affective devices that shape territorial imaginaries, collective memory, and forms of resistance.

The project focuses on community archives connected to struggles for water, land, and high-mountain ecosystems. Methodologically, it combines three main axes: the digitization and activation of community archives, the creation of sound cartographies of the páramo, and the use of video elicitation as a collaborative ethnographic tool. These approaches seek not only to preserve audiovisual materials at risk, but also to reactivate ecological memory, intergenerational dialogue, and situated forms of knowledge production. Sound cartographies expand the research beyond ocular-centered perspectives by attending to the acoustic landscapes of water, wind, fauna, agricultural practices, and rituals, while video elicitation enables collective interpretation and re-signification of archival images.

The comparative approach across Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru reveals both shared and situated forms of resistance to transnational extractive projects. The research examines the anti-mining mobilizations against La Colosa in Tolima, the long-standing defense of water territories against the Loma Larga project in Azuay, and the prolonged socio-environmental struggles in Cajamarca, where peasant patrols (rondas campesinas) have played a central role in resisting large-scale gold mining.

Rather than treating these cases as isolated experiences, the project understands them as variations of a broader visual-political conflict between extractive regimes of representation and community-based practices of care and territorial defense. By following images, archives, sounds, and collaborative practices, the research contributes to rethinking the role of visual and sensory cultures in the construction of ecological futures grounded in reciprocity, environmental justice, and the defense of the commons.