Drawing Through Amuya

Andean Epistemologies and the Relational Practice of Landscape

Abstract

This article explores how drawing, understood through Indigenous Andean epistemologies, can function as a relational and ecological practice of situated knowledge. Moving beyond the Western tradition of landscape drawing as visual capture, the article frames drawing as an embodied, metabolic process grounded in the Aymara concept of amuyt’aña — a form of thinking-feeling that unfolds through the lungs, heart, and liver, where breath, blood, and nutrients link the body directly to land and cosmos. Within this framework, the landscape does not exist as an external scene to be framed or possessed, but as a relational field that flows through and shapes the body itself.

Through Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui’s ‘ch’ixi’ concept, which holds contradictory Indigenous and colonial epistemologies together without resolution, the article examines how drawing can embrace and reveal the tensions between extractive mapping, environmental degradation, and ancestral care practices. The practice of drawing — using both local earth pigments and digital layers — traces the conflicting lines of ecological violence, political struggle, and spiritual care that converge in the contested landscapes of the Atacama Desert.

Drawing, in this sense, becomes both a practice of relational attunement and a gesture of care. It resists the desire to simplify or fix landscapes into stable representations, instead holding space for the living, breathing entanglements between bodies, land, and memory. Ultimately, the article argues for drawing as a process of staying with landscapes in transformation, aligning body, breath, and hand with their fragile, ongoing becoming.