“Healing as Technology: Reclaiming Ancestral Knowledge in the Amazon” with Bárbara Santos

This lecture explores healing as a form of technology deeply rooted in Amazonian ancestral knowledge, revealing alternative scientific frameworks that challenge dominant Western paradigms.

Drawing from years of research and collaboration with Indigenous communities, artist and researcher Bárbara Santos reveals how healing is not only a practice but also a technology—one embedded in relational, ecological, and spiritual understandings of the world.

Through stories, visual archives, and material explorations, this lecture will examine how Indigenous knowledge systems offer alternative ways of thinking about science, sustainability, and the body’s relationship to land. Santos will address the ongoing extractivist threats to Amazonian ecologies and highlight how deforestation is not just an environmental crisis but an epistemic one—erasing ways of knowing, relating, and healing that have sustained communities for generations.

By foregrounding Indigenous epistemologies, Santos invites us to reconsider the meaning of technology itself—not as a tool for domination, but as a process of care, reciprocity, and coexistence with the environment. This talk offers a space to reflect on what it means to intervene in the Amazon, not through extraction but through deep listening and respect for the life-sustaining knowledge embedded in its forests, rivers, and peoples.

Language: English with close-captions

Bárbara Santos (she/her) is a visual artist and researcher whose work explores transformation through the intersection of art, technology, and Amazonian ancestral knowledge. Since 2005, she has worked extensively in the Vaupés and Putumayo regions of the Colombian Amazon. Bárbara is the author of La curación como tecnología and co-editor of El libro Jaguares de Yuruparí and Seed Mothers. She co-created the online exhibit Bosquesinas campesinas (2021) and has presented video installations like Delegar el sentido (2017-2021) and Oro Tapado (2021-2025). Her collective projects challenge traditional art structures and formats by embracing the rich aesthetics that emerge from cultural encounters. Through her work, Bárbara makes visible the transformative power of art and the knowledge systems of the Amazon.

This lecture is part of the Unwired Currents—Imagining Technology Otherwise free online lecture series challenging dominant narratives of design, knowledge-making, and technological progress.

The lecture series has been curated by Valentina Alcalde Gómez and Adriana Palencia from the Latin American platform Matería Oscura, alongside Maya Ober from Futuress. It is part of the Unwired Currents—Imagining Technology Otherwise larger collaborative project between the think & do tank Dezentrum and Futuress, along with the transnational collective Dreaming Beyond AI, designer and researcher Franca López Barbera, and Matería Oscura.

The program is possible thanks to a generous grant from the Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia.