Jardin Botanico (2025)

In 2025 I collaborated with Siona Indigenous community to co-create a botanical garden in the Resguardo of Buenavista, southern Colombia. This initiative is dedicated to biodiversity conservation, ancestral knowledge preservation, and the strengthening of traditional practices.

Through a series of community-led expeditions into the deeper, more biodiverse territories of the Amazon, we identified, collected, and replanted endangered plant species of profound medicinal, cultural, and spiritual significance. These species now thrive within a new, collectively protected space.

Funded by the Centre for Shamanic Education and Exchange, the garden demonstrates the inextricable link between biodiversity and cultural practice. It is a living repository where community wisdom is actively transmitted through storytelling, ritual, and the act of planting itself. More than just a site for ecological restoration, it functions as a vital space for learning, healing, and cultural revitalization. Ultimately, the garden stands as an act of spiritual continuity, a place where language, ritual, and biodiversity coexist in a mutually sustaining dialogue.

The initiative also introduced new tools for the sustainable distillation of plant essences into oils and medicines, offering eco-friendly economic alternatives to coca cultivation and cattle ranching rooted in indigenous knowledge.

By blending traditional knowledge with ecological innovation, the project cultivates community self-sufficiency, resilience, and healing, while strengthening the reciprocal bonds between people, plants, and the land.

Plantas Madres (2024)

Among the Indigenous peoples of the Western Amazon, where animistic cosmologies are the norm, relationships between human and other-than-human beings are at the core of medical, spiritual, and cultural systems. Here, plants are regarded as intelligent beings and active participants in knowledge transmission, memory, and healing.

Plantas Madres is an ongoing project that seeks to provide different perspectives that question anthropocentric views by mystifying the portraiture of plants . The work invites viewers to see plants not as silent objects, but as sentient beings, repositories of wisdom, stillness and resilience.

The photographs in this collection portray sacred, medicinal, and ornamental plants found in the tropical rainforests of northeastern and southern Brazil and the Upper Western Amazon of Colombia.