The Girl, the Forest, the Wind and All the Memory in the World. Sensory Paths in Paz Encina’s EAMI

Abstract

EAMI, the fourth feature film by Paz Encina, introduces an ethical interest in the construction of a memory already present in Encina´s previous films, but here it assumes a cosmopolitics that redefines the relationships between humans and the more than human. In its ways of accounting for the extractivist advance, the territorial dispossession and the extermination of the Ayoreo world, EAMI problematizes the dichotomy between fiction and documentary not only because the testimonies and recreations that it stages speak the language of that community, but also because they follow their worldview, their understanding of time and space. Based on recent studies on new materialisms and affect, reflections on Amerindian ontologies and visual anthropology, this essay aims to discuss the ways in which this documentary rearticulates the order of the sensible to delimit the order of what matters. If the decapitation of the forest is also the destruction of their common forms of understanding, EAMI’s act of memory seeks to create a sensory atmosphere and a temporality that makes it possible to broaden the audience for this loss. Inscribed in its formal language, the film assumes the denunciation of the Ayoreo and tries to subdue our (in)sensitivity of coñone (the term with which that community refers to all outsiders as "the insensitive") to make us participate in the suffering of another people.