This short film gives a brief overview on how Ecuador became the first country in the world in 2008 to enshrine a set of codified Rights of Nature which embodies the “sumak kawsay” or buen vivir in Spanish (‘good living’) principles.
SALUD PROPIA The human societies maintain complex and multiple relations with the beings and the elements of the planet. To look for viable solutions of existence, without ideological essentialism is the objective. In the 18th century, the return to nomadic or semi-nomadic ways of life for many Amazonian populations, when sedentary life was the norm, was one of the solutions found to escape from the European slavers.
Whether in the form of animism (dialogues with spirits, with the beings of the world), totemism (symbolic representations), analogism (comparison) or naturalism (distanced observation), innovative cultural constructions are legion to maintain the possibility of living.
This last conception of the relationship to the world is inscribed, in the end, in a very short temporality, it is an exception in the human history. If this approach is inspired by the scientific considerations of the time, with all its benefits, it is the first to create such a great distance with natural beings.
Through this video, we invite you to reflect on this modernist exception, to consider it not as a fatality, but as a parenthesis.
Through the knowledge and observation of complexity, both in organization and multiplicity, this project invites us to rethink our relationship to the world, to open up the horizons of thought and the perspectives of reaction.
It is a proposal to reinvent, renew and rediscover approaches to otherness, both human and non-human. A proposal to question the necessary and the superfluous of our modes of existence.
It is not to find a primordial naturalness but to question what supports the life of the human beings, in a fruitful dialogue with the other inhabitants who share this world, still unique. Thomas Bouchet (Anthropologist)
