A person dressed in traditional indigenous attire, wearing a colorful headdress with red curls and a tall feather, and decorated face paint, standing outdoors among greenery with hands on chest.

Manari Ushigua, Sapara Nation, Ecuador, 2024

"We Sapara are connected with the trees, and through that connection, we care for each other." — Manari Ushigua, Spiritual Leader of the Sapara Nation

Dense jungle with various green and dark leaves, some wet, with sunlight filtering through the canopy.
Corn husks on a wooden floor with a person's bare foot and another person's feet in green slippers visible.
Two wooden canoes floating on a river with a forested landscape in the background.

NAKU means forest.

Not a place you enter. A living world that holds you. Naku is constituted by spirit beings — human and other than human. Animals, rivers, trees, rocks, wind. All of them carrying thought. All of them in relationship.

The Sapara people of the Ecuadorian Amazon have lived inside this relationship for thousands of years. Once numbering over 20,000, fewer than 700 remain today. Only three elders still speak their language fluently — a language declared by UNESCO a Masterpiece of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity in 2001.

What is being lost is not only a language. It is an entire way of knowing the world.

Close-up of hands tying a rope, with colorful bangles on the wrist, wearing a pink garment.
Young woman smiling and kneeling inside a small wooden structure, holding a decorative ceramic plate with a butterfly design, surrounded by other bowls and stones.
Two people walking through a dense jungle, surrounded by lush green banana and palm trees.

NUKAKI means one.

This work was made from inside that understanding. Not as a visitor. Not as a documentarian arriving with a camera and leaving with images. But as a witness in relationship — through years of collaboration with the Sapara Nation and the Naku Foundation, through ceremony, through shared dreaming, through the slow and sacred work of trust.

Antüpewma Rülkelme Mella approaches the camera as ceremony. Each portrait is an act of listening. Each landscape is a prayer. The llanchama bark cloth on which some of these images are printed is itself a living material — harvested from the forest, returned to it in form.

Photography as witness rather than extraction. Art as reciprocity rather than taking.

A foggy landscape of lush green trees and shrubs under a cloudy sky.
A person sits on the edge of a boat on a river, with another person standing at the bow, rowing. The surrounding scenery is lush and green, with blurred trees and sky in the background.
A shirtless man with dark hair relaxing on a hammock inside a rustic wooden structure, holding a bowl of food, with a young girl standing behind him. The background shows wooden beams and some hanging items.

WITSAHA means thank you.

Every image in this series is an act of gratitude. To the Sapara people who allowed themselves to be seen. To the forest that held the camera alongside us. To the ancestors whose voices still move through the three elders who carry the language. To the land itself — 900,000 acres of primary rainforest still intact, still dreaming, still here.

Witsaha. For what remains. For what can still be protected.

Close-up of an elderly woman with dark hair, deep facial wrinkles, wearing a white shirt, with a gentle expression on her face, outdoors with blurred trees in the background.
A young child with dark hair and a black shirt peeks through thick green foliage and leaves in a jungle or garden setting, looking directly at the camera.
Two children, a boy and a girl, outdoors near water, smiling and looking at the camera.

About the work

Whispers of the Amazon is a photographic and storytelling project created in collaboration with Sapara leader Manari Ushigua and the Naku Foundation. Through large-format portraiture, oral history, environmental imagery, and immersive sound, the work documents the ancestral wisdom and climate resistance of the Sapara people of the Ecuadorian Amazon.

Presented as pigment prints on llanchama bark cloth, amate bark paper, and living leaves — with hand embroidery, weaving, and 23.75k gold leaf interventions — this series invites viewers to experience photography as ceremony. Each material is itself a messenger. The llanchama harvested from the forest. The amate bark carrying centuries of indigenous mark-making. The leaves still holding the memory of the tree.

An act of remembrance, reciprocity, and protection..

The installation integrates soundscapes and video created in collaboration with the Sapara Nation. Voices, dreams, and forest sounds expand the visual experience, transforming any space into an immersive environment where ceremony, ecology, and storytelling converge.

2024 — ongoing New Jersey, USA / Ecuadorian Amazon

Supported by the Naku Foundation In partnership with the Sapara Nation

For exhibition, licensing, and acquisition inquiries:dani@danimiranda.co