Winner of the S+T+ARTS Prize Buen-TEK 2026, S+T+ARTS initiative of the European Commission, IMPAKT Festival, Utrecht, the Netherlands.

At the intersection of contemporary art, social justice, and ancestral knowledge, Counter-Cartographies of Resistance emerges as an immersive installation conceived as a techno-political device for repair and recovery. The work begins with a central question: how can the map be reimagined not as a tool of control and domination, but as a technology capable of listening, connecting, and healing?

From this perspective, the installation subverts traditional cartography—historically used as one of the geopolitical instruments of colonial expansion during the 16th and 17th centuries—and transforms it into a tool for making visible the knowledge systems of Andean and mestizo America. Rather than fixing borders or reinforcing logics of possession, Counter-Cartographies of Resistance proposes another way of reading territory: as living memory, relational fabric, and sensitive body.

The project proposes an innovation with roots: a technology of listening. By integrating the concept of Suma Qamaña (Buen Vivir / Good Living) and the Quipu recording system, the work builds a bridge between millenary cosmologies and contemporary demands for inclusion, sustainability, and cultural justice. Within this framework, territory is no longer understood as a resource to be extracted, but as a living body in need of care and repair.

Through a counter-cartography carrying a message of repair from machi Millaray Melinao in the form of video mapping, the installation creates a symbolic bridge between the North and South of the continent. In doing so, it brings together times, territories, and forms of knowledge shaped by other paradigms—paradigms that the work honours and invites audiences to experience.

More than representing a territory, Counter-Cartographies of Resistance reclaims it, renders it visible, and reactivates it as a space of memory and healing. The work proposes a different relationship between humanity and the earth, between technology and ancestry, and between innovation and historical responsibility.

Counter-Cartographies of Resistance is, ultimately, a healing map: a visual and technological manifesto in which art, data science, and ancestral wisdom converge to rethink what Buen Vivir can mean in the digital age.