For this edition, we invite academic essays that engage critically with the questions raised by scholars Morgana Herrera (Université Sorbonne Nouvelle) and Giuliana Vidarte (Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú). In keeping with the journal’s longstanding interest in creative and experimental forms of inquiry, apart from academic essays, we also welcome visual essays and performative writings that explore alternative modes of knowledge production.

The call will remain open until April 15, 2026, and the issue will be published on December 15, 2026. All submissions must be made through the OJS platform.

All submissions will be received through the OJS platform:
https://revistas.usfq.edu.ec/index.php/posts/about/submissions

All submissions must meet the following requirements:
– The text adheres to the stylistic and bibliographic requirements outlined in the Author’s Guidelines, which appear in About the Journal.
– The submission file is in Microsoft Word format (.doc / .docx).
– The submission has been made using the journal management system. In this system, the title (in Spanish and English), abstract (Spanish and English), keywords (Spanish and English), complete bibliography (in accordance with APA standards), and full author information must be
entered.
– The author agrees to publish the article under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0).
– The submitted file does not contain personal information of the author (name, affiliation), in order to avoid conflicts of interest during the peer-review process.

For further details regarding the submission and review process, please consult the information section on our website or download the guide for authors: http://posts.usfq.edu.ec/

Exhibit and hide.
Amazonian Imaginations.

For this issue of post(s), we take as our point of departure the proliferation of exhibitions, film festivals, public talks, and other events focused on the Amazonia, in order to ask how this space, along with its knowledges and communities, has been exhibited, seen, and staged over time, and how it has also been concealed, perhaps in response to this (over-)exposure.(1)

The editors of this issue, working from the fields of history, art history, and curatorial practice, conduct research on Amazonian themes and have met repeatedly in the Amazon to carry out collaborative fieldwork. Living on different continents, we work almost entirely at a distance—through Zoom and WhatsApp. This call for papers reflects the dynamics of our transatlantic conversations and invites contributors to join this ongoing dialogue by sharing reflections grounded in diverse languages, territories, contexts, and Amazonian ways of knowing.

Giuliana:
Thinking about our experience as historians of Amazonia, and the frustration we have often felt due to the scarcity of archives—alongside the joy brought by the generosity of those who have shared their stories and data with us—we might begin by asking how Amazonian histories and memories have been preserved or silenced.

Morgana:
It is ironic that my point of entry into Amazonia was through the study of the fourth centenary of its so-called “discovery.” I am critical of this historical vision, which begins with the exploits of a group of men in search of the non-existent tierra de la canela. Yet their failure to comprehend what lay before them—their impulse to imagine Amazons where there were none—has profoundly shaped how Amazonia has been seen, represented, and understood.

Giuliana:
These visualities, emerging from the myth of the Amazons you mention, botanical illustrations, maps, photographs, and so on, have served diverse purposes: the recognition of territory and its inhabitants, the constitution of borders, or the denial of Indigenous communities’ existence. They point to a desire to catalogue, to exhibit “discoveries”, a word also used to describe moments of extractive booms such as rubber, oil, or palm oil, which supposedly would bring the long-awaited “progress.”

Morgana:
This brings to mind James C. Scott’s argument (2022) that states seek to make abandoned or marginal spaces “legible” in order to administer them more effectively and exert greater control over their resources and inhabitants. It also connects to Marie-Louise Pratt’s (2010) notion of “imperial eyes”—the gaze of travelers whose narratives shape territories according to the needs of external agents.

Speaking of eyes, this leads me to the title of one of the most significant exhibitions of Amazonian art in Peruvian art history, El ojo verde (2). Its catalogue opens by stating: “At the beginning of the twenty-first century, a second ‘discovery’ of the Amazon is taking place, both within Peru and globally” (Macera and Dávila Herrera, 2025). Do you think exhibitions can produce a positive paradigm of “discovery”?

Giuliana:
You are right to recall an exhibition that marked a milestone, because exhibitions on the Amazon often strive to claim the status of “the first exhibition to do this or that.” To move beyond this paradigm, we need to think of the exhibition space as a site situated within an unfinished process—one marked by opacity—that allows us to engage with what cannot be made fully visible.

Morgana:
Exactly. Many practices instead articulate a relationship to the Amazon through concealment—beginning with Indigenous peoples who are forced to hide from extractive mafias. I appreciate how Pablo Mora (2023) formulates it: “The so-called uncontacted peoples who exist in the Amazon are the spearhead—or the perfect analogy—of an emerging ethos: to delocalize oneself, to hide from drones and surveillance devices […] and many other counter-visual practices and attitudes. […] To reclaim the right to hide is to reclaim the right to exist.”

This resonates with the theme of cimarronaje, which took place in the Amazon regions of French Guiana, Suriname, and Brazil. Dénètem Touam Bona (2016) offers a compelling praise of this “art of escape.” Along similar lines, from the Caribbean, Édouard Glissant (1996) speaks of the right to opacity. I’m not sure if I mentioned that I saw La Vorágine más allá by Mapa Teatro, in which they chose not to translate the dialogues of their Nukak actors in order to preserve this opacity. We should also refer to the invisible beings that inhabit the Amazon and are revealed by artists. I am particularly drawn to how an artist like Lastenia Canayo, through her owners of the plants, represents beings not visible to everyone. These processes reveal the need to generate a harmonious relationship between the world of the visible and that of the invisible. Perhaps this is why Lastenia’s figures smile, don’t you think?

Giuliana:
Do they smile because they summon these encounters? Because they can see without being seen? The link between knowledge of spiritual beings and Amazonian artists is fundamental. I think of Yando Ríos’s works, where overlapping bodies of animals, plant forms, constellations, and mythical beings unfold across different skins. I also think of ancestral geometric networks that evoke paths and beings traversing time and territory, as in the paintings of Sheroanawe Hakihiiwe, the installations of Daiara Tukano, or the works of the Soi Noma collective.

Ailton Krenak’s writing about rivers—alive even when we do not see them—also comes to mind, as he proposes that their waters expand our visions of the world and give meaning to our existence. It is also important to mention Enrique Pezo and the photographic series we have included in the visual materials for this call, as his work reveals how historical memory persists within contemporary imaginaries, even when sustained by what remains hidden.

In this call, we invite researchers and artists to share their perspectives on how the pan-Amazon has been viewed, discovered, concealed, revealed, and hidden. Drawing from history, the social sciences, film, the visual arts, literature, activism, and community-based knowledges, we seek to problematize the production of these memories in order to deepen our understanding of the becoming of the visible and invisible vital networks of Amazonian ecosystems.

Footnotes

1 To cite just a few recent examples: the first two editions of the Bienal das Amazônias in Belém do Pará (2023 and 2025), curated in its inaugural edition by Sandra Benites, Keyna Eleison, Vânia Leal, and Flavya Mutra, and in its second edition by Manuela Moscoso, Sara Garzón, Mónica Amieva and Jean da Silva; El futuro ancestral, curated by Claudi Carreras at the CCCB (13 November 2024–25 October 2025); the 6th Montevideo Biennial, Amazonas ancestral, curated by Alfons Hug and Alejandro Denes (23 October–30 November 2025); the section Wametisé at ARCOmadrid 2025, curated by Denilson Baniwa and María Wills; and Amazônia, Créations et futurs autochtones, curated by Leandro Varison and Denilson Baniwa at the Musée du Quai Branly (30 September 2025–18 January 2026). The period has also been marked by key events shaping debates on climate change and environmental justice, such as COP30, held in November 2025 in Belém do Pará, alongside initiatives that position themselves as forms of resistance and creation emerging from Amazonian communities themselves. These include the Muyuna Fest, a floating rainforest film festival in Iquitos, and Kanua, the Floating Amazonian Film Festival organized by Tawna collective, which has navigated between Ecuador and Peru.

2 Curated by Gredna Landolt, Pablo Macera y FORMABIAP (Lima, 2000).

References

Canayo, L., & Del Águila, C. (2019). Magia y verdad del mundo shipibo. Ikono.

Glissant, E. (1996). Introduction à une poétique du divers. Gallimard.

Krenak, A. (2022). Futuro ancestral. Companhia das Letras.

Macera, P., & Dávila Herrera, C. (2025). Introducción. En El ojo verde: Cosmovisiones amazónicas (3.ª ed. corregida y aumentada). FORMABIAP/AIDESEP.

Mora, P. (2023). El espejo roto de la representación indígena. En Sembrar la duda: Indicios sobre las representaciones indígenas en Colombia (pp. 136–147). Banco de la República.

Pratt, M.-L. (2010). Ojos imperiales: Literatura de viajes y transculturación. Fondo de Cultura Económica.

Scott, J. C. (2022). Lo que ve el Estado: Cómo ciertos esquemas para mejorar la condición humana han fracasado. Fondo de Cultura Económica.

Touam Bona, D. (2016). Fugitif, où cours-tu ? Presses Universitaires de France.

About the Guest Editors

Morgana Herrera holds a PhD in Latin American Studies from Université Toulouse Jean Jaurès (France), a diploma in Quechua from INALCO in Paris, and an MA in Latin American Studies from the École Normale Supérieure de Lyon. She has published articles in several academic journals on intellectual and artistic productions from the Peruvian Amazon. She is currently a tenured professor of Latin American Studies at Université Sorbonne Nouvelle in Paris, co-director of the university’s trilingual Master’s program in Cultural Management, and is preparing the publication of her doctoral dissertation with IFEA Press, co-published with the Instituto Riva Agüero, titled Ahora le toca a la selva. Nuevas voces amazónicas en torno al IV centenario del descubrimiento del río Amazonas de 1942.

Giuliana Vidarte is a curator, art historian, and educator. She has developed research and exhibition projects on the relationships between visual arts and literature, the rewriting of history through the recovery of non-official narratives, the history of the arts and contemporary creation in the Peruvian Amazon, and the connections between traditional knowledge systems and artistic practices in the twenty-first century. She teaches at the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru (PUCP) and works as an independent curator and researcher. In 2019, she served as curatorial assistant for the Peruvian Pavilion at the 58th Venice Biennale. From 2018 to 2024, she was Head of Curatorship and Collection at the Museum of Contemporary Art of Lima. She is currently a doctoral candidate in History at PUCP, conducting research on the history and art history of the Peruvian Amazon in the twentieth century.