Ngen

The idea of ​​making the short film Ngen arises from a concern linked to my years of work as an ethnologist, an exploration still in development, about the notions of life or conceptions of the living present in Amerindian thought. Which points out that in certain non-Western indigenous traditions this phenomenon is extended to a set of existences that Western or naturalist thought considers inert bodies or lifeless objects. That is to say, in these realities what is alive is a broader concept than the one that we are taught in modern biology courses taught in basic schools.
and Western media, which is limited to those beings that are born, grow, reproduce and die as a simplified definition.
For many American indigenous peoples, the phenomenon of life is extensive to minerals, meteorological and astronomical phenomena, religious objects, beings whose corporality is invisible to our eyes, telluric forces and certain artifacts endowed with volition and agency, which are part of the complex network of social relations involving human and non-human beings.
In many of these realities, the world is conceived as a place populated by a multiplicity of beings with whom humans interact –positively or negatively–, share their future, establish relationships of alterity, reciprocity, kinship, alliance and revenge, to mention a few. . Each of these forms of existence meet
classified by indigenous thought and are objectified according to the degree of power, "agentivity" and "animacy" they possess, which accounts for a complex theory of the living or alive, which is expressed both in the discursive field, and in the daily practices
and rituals.
Knowing this phenomenon and having studied it in other contexts, I decided to look for a case in which this type of relationship was expressed in Chile and address it through film discourse. That is how, after an incessant exploration, I decided to work with the Mapuche people.
In this way, through detailed photographic work and careful sound design, supported by immersive ethnographic research in the line of direct cinema and visual anthropology, Ngen began to be delineated. A work that tries to account for the oral narratives of a Lafkenche machi and the relationship she establishes with nature and the non-human presences that inhabit it. A world to which we rarely have access as non-Mapuche, due to the "closed, secret or initiatory nature" that this religious system has for those who are not part of this culture.