WATA (firewitch)
Engaging with the forest as kin, collaborator, and witness to colonial trauma, WATA (firewitch) would consist of site-specific sculptural assemblages and stream-of-consciousness ritual performances of ‘embodied territorial ancestral healing’, mediated through Afro-Indigenous Cosmologies in the region of Cerrado of Pindorama (so-called Brazil).

Khipucamayoc: weaver of arboreal entanglements (2025)

site-specific ritual performance and sculptural remnant of performance

performance documentation photo credit: Natalia Benish-Kalná

photo credit: lwrds duniam

The works I will create in collaboration with these forests, regardless of how ephemeral, will be documented through photo, video, and/or collections of remnants (when feasible). These will be used for exhibit in Campinas as printed photographs, video work, mark-making, and remediated sculpture/installation.

lwrds duniam (they) is an interdisciplinary artist, designer, researcher, educator, and 2019 OCAD University graduate (BFA Integrated Media) living and creating in Tkaronto (Toronto). Born in Callao, Perú in 1984, lwrds has been calling Turtle Island home since 2002. Their ARTivism is grounded in disability justice, Decolonial Critical Theory, and is anti-racist, anti-oppressive, sex-positive, and trauma-informed. Through their decolonial land-based research and creation, lwrds grapples with issues of diasporic identity, displacement, and positionality in flux, seeking to reconcile multiple realities and timelines of colonization that are ongoing, perpetuating harm, and alive within their body as a mixed-race Afro-Indigenous person (of European descent), complicated by an imposed latinidad they reject for its colonial roots.