Identidad, memoria y presencia is a project exploring the transformation of the cultural identity of the Piaroa communities in the face of critical change. Pressures from illegal mining, material scarcity, and the labor displacement of men have concentrated cultural transmission in women and children, who sustain, reinterpret, and reinvent the community’s clothing and aesthetic codes. Through fashion photography, the images capture this tension, showing how tradition adapts without disappearing.

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Analog film acts as an active participant. Just as urban life impacts the jungle, the jungle intervenes in the film: humidity, rain, and light alter the emulsion, leaving visible traces documenting a dialogue between progress and tradition, fragility and resilience. Each mark becomes a material testament to the interaction between environment and culture, showing how the ancestral and contemporary coexist and transform.

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Collars, guayucos, and onoto body paints are neither costumes nor decoration: they are codes of memory, identity, and resistance. In children and women, these traditional pieces coexist with urban clothing, reflecting adaptation to material scarcity and external influence. Everyday garments and objects are integrated into the composition, becoming carriers of a visual language linking aesthetics, memory, and territory.

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My intervention as a Venezuelan photographer seeks to make this process visible without appropriation: the images emerge from coexistence, collaboration, and observation of living culture. Inspired by community leader Mario Arana, who balances tradition with urban influences to ensure continuity, the film becomes a metaphor for this 50/50: the environment intervenes in the image while the image reshapes our perception of culture. The altered emulsion materializes the interaction between urban and ancestral, showing how culture adapts and progresses even in critical circumstances.

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This project does not aim to document loss, but to show how cultural identity reinvents itself and survives in the hands of those who sustain tradition. The jungle, light, humidity, and the photograph act as co-authors, creating a living record of a dialogue between past and present, fragility and resilience, where culture resists, adapts, and transforms.