By Andrea Vela Alarcón, Graduate Resident
My Sherman Center Graduate Residency project starts in my hometown, Iquitos. This city is located in the Peruvian Amazon and has a long history of resource extraction, which has shaped the way I relate to my body, my territory, and, consequently, my research.
Growing up in Iquitos, I was able to see a world of separation, instrumentalization and extraction of certain kinds of bodies. I remember walking by huge sawmills and seeing former trees cover blocks of the city. Often, in these cemetery-like spaces, there were men in search of young female bodies, which made me realize how my body was seen as a desired commodity. This made me question, how those former trees and my body were related.
It is from this experience that I found it necessary to dig deeper into the history of resource extraction in Iquitos and its connection with the commoditization of women via the “exotic woman” stereotype.
Tracing history: “The Exotic Amazon and The Exotic Woman”
“The Exotic Amazon and The Exotic Woman” is a counter-storytelling project that is constantly being written. It contains a series of personal written and illustrated reflections examining my relationship with Loreto, a region in the Peruvian Amazon, from a geographic, historical, and gendered lens.
My text and illustrations grapple with the narratives of “exotic woman” in the Amazon and the colonial history of resource extraction that marks the territory. The publication’s written part traces Loreto’s colonial and gendered histories in the Amazon, while the illustrations use desire (Tuck, 2009) to draw from personal and collective mythologies from the Amazon. This counter-storytelling project is my attempt to refuse the ways my body navigates a place marked by patriarchal and extractive processes.
Through this counter-storytelling project, I do not claim to speak on behalf of all cisgender women from Loreto, as my social location is not the norm, and massively digresses from the experiences of Indigenous, Ribereña and lower-class mestiza women in Loreto. However, Urmipata Dutta (2022) explains that when engaging with counter-storytelling, our work goes beyond identity politics as it enacts political intimacy based on recognizing and witnessing shared, but not equal, struggles.
What am I dreaming of at the graduate residency?
As part of the Sherman Center graduate residency, I want to dream about how my counter-storytelling project, “The Exotic Amazon and The Exotic Woman,” will acquire a creative digital form that maintains engaging storytelling capable of reaching an audience beyond the academy.
The first idea is adapting of the text and illustrations from “The Exotic Amazon and The Exotic Woman” into an interactive essay using the format of “scrollytelling”, which, as its name foregrounds, uses the scrolling effect to explore and reveal the content hosted on the website. Through this format, the illustrations and text acquire motion and can reveal content as the “audience” immerses themselves at their own pace through the moving vignettes. The format of “scrollytelling” can allow for compelling visual storytelling to be as relevant as the text.
The second idea is a bit less explored, but the vision is to adapt three illustrations and excerpts from “The Exotic Amazon and The Exotic Woman” into short animations that can be outputted as augmented reality (AR) assets kept on a web page (WebAR). These elements will later be placed, through geolocation, in specific places in Iquitos. To see the animations in the space, people would have to hold their phones towards a QR code. The QR codes would be in the form of medium-sized stickers with the titles “exotic Women” and “exotic Amazon”; they would be placed on walls in specific sites of Iquitos’s downtown.
What are my expectations as a Sherman Center Graduate Resident?
To carry out either of the ideas, I need to gain the technical knowledge that will allow me to transform and house the text and illustrations in the digital space. I’m hoping to get guidance on the best way to carry the ideas out and connect with experts who can help me achieve this. Also, before the digital project is created, I would like to get guidance on a plan to promote it through and beyond academic spaces.
While in the graduate residency, I see the opportunity to transform “The Exotic Amazon and The Exotic Woman” into a digital space of political and pedagogical encounters. The text and illustrations are sites of political action that expose intimate and regional history around resource extraction in Iquitos. The digital intervention would offer an entry point for reflections on reclaiming power and alternative relationalities to the land and among women.
About Andrea Vela Alarcón
Andrea Vela Alarcón (she/her/Ella) is a community educator, illustrator and doctoral candidate in Communication, New Media, and Cultural Studies at McMaster University. Her academic, creative and pedagogical practices are rooted in anti-colonial approaches and feminist care ethics to facilitate spaces of critical conversations and creation geared toward a world beyond extraction. Through her work, Andrea collaborates with communities in the crafting of stories that center refusal and resistance against the logic of capitalist resource extraction.
During her tenure as a resident with the Sherman Centre, Andrea aims to develop a digital storytelling intervention presenting a series of personal written and illustrated reflections examining, from a geographic, historical, and gendered lens, her relationship with the Amazonian city of Iquitos (Peru) and its long history of resource extraction. The project will be understood as a process and site of political action exposing and unmasking non-innocent histories and stories that perpetuate the easy politics of ‘exotic women’ and ‘Terra Nulius’. Histories and stories that continue to legitimize resource extraction’s sexual commodification of Amazonian girls and women.
References
Dutta, U. (2022). Reimagining the Politics of Belonging Through Counterstorytelling: A Decolonial Praxis of Refusal and Desire. Qualitative Inquiry,
Tjärnhage, A., Söderström, U., Norberg, O., Andersson, M., & Mejtoft, T. (2023). The Impact of Scrollytelling on the Reading Experience of Long-Form Journalism. Proceedings of the European Conference on Cognitive Ergonomics 2023, 1–9
Tuck, E. (2009). Suspending Damage: A Letter to Communities. Harvard Educational Review, 79(3), 409–428.
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