Pablo Escudero (Ecuadorian, b.1984), Ghazal Jafari (Iranian/Azeri, b.1982), Pierre Bélanger (Canadian, b.1971) in collaboration with Alejandra Pinto (Ecuadorian, b.1988), Patricia Yallico (Ecuadorian, n.d.), Alexander Arroyo (American, b.1984), Hernan L. Bianchi Benguria (Chilean, b.1982), Natalia Dueñas (Ecuadorian, b.1988), Tiffany Kaewen Dang (Canadian, b.1989) of La Minga (Ecuador, est.2016) / OPEN SYSTEMS (USA, est.2001)
Album
Description
As evidenced by the history of the Quino tree, there is a fundamental territorial conflict at the center of the transnational world today, resulting in the oppression, exploitation, and elimination of Indigenous Peoples. Thus, the Quino tree is a living world of soils, airs, climates, temperatures, territories, histories, beings, and peoples.
This installation is a treaty whose history of resistance, subsistence, and resilience led by Indigenous women, proposes a way to rebuild relations with the Quino tree, its peoples, and its territories. The Quino Treaty, acknowledges that, until the systems and structures of dispossession and dehumanization—including regional conservation measures, national land policies, foreign scientific interventions, international patent laws, transnational trade agreements—are acknowledged and dismantled, a decolonial future, where we can live together, cannot take place.
The Quino Treaty is not about preserving “The” Andes or saving “The” Amazon, it is about mending and rebuilding relations, retroactively, with Indigenous Nations that fight for the self-determination of this natural world. It is also about building a new and different world by undoing the dangerous imperial, extractive game that dominates us.
WITH THE ADDITIONAL SUPPORT OF
OPSYS Inc.
Facultad de Arquitectura, Diseño y Artes de la Universidad Católica del Ecuador
Facultad de Arquitectura Universidad de las Américas Quito
Facultad de Arquitectura Universidad Internacional SEK
Production credits
Creative Team: Alejandra Pinto, Patricia Yallico, Alexander Arroyo, Hernan L. Bianchi Benguria, Natalia Dueñas, Tiffany Kaewen Dang
We would like to acknowledge that this project is conceived on lands of the Kechwa Peoples of Quito, whose struggles for self-determination are rooted in the appropriation of their lands by the Spanish Conquistador Sebastian de Benalcazar in 1534. At the origins of the histories of appropriation is the exploration and the extraction of quinine from the Cinchona tree that is the underlying premise for European colonization based on the extraction of Quinine that has persisted until today for over 390 years. This Indigenous struggle emerges from ongoing territorial dispossession, violence against women, and dehumanization of the Saraguro, Palta, Tsachila, Chachi, Epera, Awa, Kechwa, Shuar, Achuar, Shiwiar, Cofan, Siona, Secoya, Zapara, Andoa, Waorani Peoples, within and beyond the settler colonial boundaries of the nation state of Ecuador.
