LA MEMORIA DE LAS MARIPOSAS (THE MEMORY OF BUTTERFLIES) was born from a single photograph: the portrait of Omarino and Aredomi holding hands in London. I felt beckoned by them. I decided to follow their footsteps and began investigating, which led me to search for them in archives from Peru, Brazil, Ireland, England, Portugal, the United States, and France. Most were propaganda images from extractive projects and colonialist expeditions from the Amazon. Both Omarino and Aredomi were enslaved by the most powerful rubber company of the time, La Casa Arana, and their story is part of the more than 40,000 indigenous people cruelly murdered under the violent system of rubber extraction.
The film demanded a montage of cuts and relations to deconstruct the official historical narratives and reveal what these images conceal. Repeating the images over and over again means answering these ghostly callings, and, at the same time, I ask myself why this image keeps coming back and what it has to tell me. Telling this story through a critical lens required me to examine my place and how I approached it. Speculation allowed me to confront where we came from and what we inherited and to imagine new futures, in close alliance with the desires of the communities of descendants where we filmed. I am constantly striving to decolonize my gaze and my approach, to imagine Omarino and Aredomi as historical subjects with agency, while also allowing opacity in their identity constructions.
This film seeks to reclaim the silenced biographies, shedding light on a brutal past while honouring the resilience of those who endured it.
I filmed in black-and-white Super 8mm, seeking a timeless image that bridges the archives with my journey. The materiality of the analogue image became the materiality of memory, a speculative, ambiguous, and undefined reality. The soundscape was also designed as a medium – a call to all the spirits in this story and natural forces of this territory: water, wind, fire, and earth. It seeks to allow them to tell the story, as witnesses to these events. During the film’s production, we met with Indigenous communities descended from rubber boom survivors along the Ampiyacu, Putumayo, and Igaraparaná rivers in Peru and Colombia. Through workshops and collective discussions, the film was deeply shaped by these encounters. Our understanding of memory shifted. Stories like those of Omarino and Aredomi are often overshadowed by dominant official narratives. This film seeks to reclaim these silenced biographies, shedding light on a brutal past while honouring the resilience of those who endured it. By sharing their story with their potential descendants, the film regenerates their memory in the present. From the beginning, I knew that telling this story went beyond what is objective and implied communicating with uncontrollable forces. The film is a threshold between the archives and the present, between the living and the dead. It attempts to be a medium, an experience that allows these transmissions.
Tatiana Fuentes Sadowski
