Ground
Works

In the Peruvian Amazon Rainforest, Indigenous communities have been living in river floodplains for millennia and have developed unique cultural connections with the living waters and their rich biodiversity. To escape hardship (e.g. over extraction of resources, slavery, climate change impacts etc.), or seek opportunities (e.g. health, education, economic etc.), hundreds of thousands of Indigenous people have migrated from the jungle to Amazonian cities such as Iquitos over the past hundred years. Referencing traditional lifestyles, many of these migrants created floating and stilted communities in the city’s floodplain edges. Their multi-generational knowledge of floodplain agriculture, amphibious housing, and deeply-rooted community structures provides cultural, economic, and ecosystem services to the whole city. However, this mass migration also created challenges in housing, infrastructure and public services for the whole city. The Iquitos regional government has responded by enacting mandatory relocation for these residents to new highland developments far from the river, threatening their unique riverine cultures and deforesting a rare white sand rainforest ecosystem. In this visual narrative, we describe a blended arts and sciences project, Tres Comunidades, Un Río: Life Within Peru’s Urban Amazonian Floodplains, in which a highly collaborative team of 24 Peruvian and U.S. researchers and artists worked closely with 136 residents across three communities to showcase their life, health, and environmental connections, promoting traditional cultures and better-informed city planning that includes Indigenous Amazonian voices. We describe our interdisciplinary arts and sciences mixed-methods approach which included a public health survey, documentary photography, community drawings, and biodiversity/environmental measures that incorporated a community training program and local/traditional-scientific knowledge exchange workshop. Lastly, we discuss the value we found in pairing data with artistic storytelling, engaging diverse disciplines and academic-community partnerships, and uplifting underserved communities via an art and data exhibition.

From 2009-2011, we worked together at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard (Broad Institute, n.d.), building on a study (Lieberman-Aiden & Van Berkum et al., 2009) that made it possible to explore how the human genome, the DNA contained in every cell of the body, folds in 3D. At the outset of our collaboration, our approaches seemed so different as to be, perhaps, incommensurable. The scientists used tools like mathematics, computer science, and molecular biology, whereas the artistic toolkit was focused on the construction of physical objects, with a defined shape, area, and volume. Yet over time, we came to realize that all of these tools were addressing the same goal: making invisible concepts manifest as an experience intelligible to the senses. From the beginning of the project, we worked together creating drawings. Over time, our interactions evolved to become free-flowing conversations while drawing, which became a way of seeing together. Our visual experimentations grew into a body of drawings, paintings, prints, mixed-media artworks, wood blocks, a dynamic video installation, and a suspended wire sculpture (Ranganathan, 2021), and helped advance the scientific community’s understanding of how the human genome folds.