Swimming with Magatdä

Swimming with Magatdä traces contemporary Ngäbe life through enduring relationships with nature across rivers, mountains, and communities, highlighting knowledge, care, and cultural continuity.

Swimming with Magatdä explores the relationship between the Ngäbe and water as a source of memory, spirituality, and resistance, tracing how communities navigate environmental and cultural pressures in a changing landscape.

For the Ngäbe, Panama’s largest Indigenous group, water is origin and memory, a sacred force connecting communities to ancestors and land. In Ngäbe cosmology, Magatdä, the great serpent, shaped the world through rivers and mountains, embodying water as both creator and destroyer.

Set in the Ngäbe Buglé Comarca, an autonomous territory in western Panama, the project traces everyday life tied to rivers, forests, and mountains, increasingly under pressure from extractive industries and energy projects. Through encounters with families, cultural initiatives, and sacred landscapes such as Klosay and Cascada Kiki, the work documents how communities maintain and negotiate their connection to land and water.

Structured as an evolving visual archive, the project focuses on continuity and local agency, bringing together fragmented yet connected perspectives where water carries memory, embodies conflict, and opens space for coexistence.