Interview: Maytik Avirama Pabon, the First Member of the Design Team

Maytik, the first person to join the FLAC’s Design Team, recounts her family’s history and heritage, and how they influenced her involvement in social movements. She also talks to us about the path that led her to become a sound artivist, the crucial role sound can play in awakening imagination, and the importance of collective care and bridging different realities.

Maytik Avirama Pabon

Maytik, you are an indigenous Kokonuko person who grew up between the Amazon, Bogotá, and the Cauca Region of Colombia. Could you share with us how these experiences moved you to become a feminist and get involved in land defense, environmental activism, and community care practices?

My indigenous family is from the Andes in the Cauca Region of Colombia; we belong to the Kokonuko indigenous people. I was born in 1991 to a family that fought as part of the Indigenous Land Defense movement in the 70s and 80s. That year, the current Constitution of Colombia was promulgated. This Constitution recognized rights that were specific to indigenous populations, such as the right to indigenous resources, and it acknowledged the fact that Colombia is a plurinational country. In many ways, growing up with this background of Indigenous Land Defense has had a profound influence on my life, and it brought me closer to social movements from a young age.

When I was six years old, my mom moved to the Amazon Rainforest, and I started to experience other indigenous realities—because the realities of the indigenous peoples of the Amazon are different from those of the indigenous peoples of the Andes. I spent most of my childhood and early adolescence in the Amazon, in Malokas, in a very communitarian setting, which had an interesting effect on my identity because I am an indigenous person from the Andes, but a lot of my cultural heritage comes from the Murui people from the Amazon.

Going back to the 1991 Constitution, this document recognized indigenous peoples’ right to the land, but in reality, these lands were being threatened by a series of extractivist projects—deforestation, mining, etc.—that put a lot of pressure on the communities, so it became necessary to do a lot of self-organizing to halt these extractivist industries’ incursions into the territories.

It was a huge struggle to get the right to indigenous lands, but we still had to contend with existing power dynamics and how these extractivist projects continued to threaten our communitarian way of life. So, from a young age, I became involved in the Environmental movement. At first, my involvement was at the community level; then I studied human ecology and became more involved with international spaces such as the UN Climate negotiations, which gave me a broader understanding of the fight against climate change and extractivism.

It soon became clear to me, however, that I was more interested in working with the communities at the grassroots level. I was interested in the practices, the strengths, the ancestral knowledge, the languages, and the ways of naming that the communities have to resist extractivism. These resistance strategies were very connected to the ways of living in the territories. It was around this time that the young, ideologically kindred, Latin American people I’d met in these international spaces and I co-created TierrActiva. Extractivism acts in a very systematic way all over Latin America, but the movements in the region are sometimes disconnected from one another, so we thought we’d create spaces to gather together and exchange ideas so we could co-construct a strong network of youth-led movements based in different Latin American countries.

At some point in my activism, I experienced burnout. I was tired, exhausted; I didn’t feel taken care of, so I decided to take a year off. During that time, it became important for me to learn more about care. Collective care is a very needed practice to make our movements and resistance sustainable. Resisting extractivism can really tax our bodies and burden our relationships, which creates a sense of loneliness and exhaustion. Activists who feel they have given everything to the movement may choose to abandon the struggle. It’s ironic because we’re fighting on the side of life, but we sometimes forget to take care of our own lives. I was already a feminist, but this made me a much more informed feminist, and I became more interested in working with women land defenders.

I began to understand why talking about the body, rest, and the ways we can take care of ourselves is also political. This is linked to the notion of “body-territory,” the idea that our bodies are connected to our territories, which means when our territories are attacked and violated, we feel it in our bodies, but also when our bodies are attacked, violated, or exhausted, that also impacts our territories. That’s the path I followed to where I am now, working with narratives that embrace life, collective care, and environmental activism from a communitarian healing perspective. I mostly work with the narratives and voices of women land defenders, but, for me, the communitarian approach is extremely important. How do we embrace these narratives and make space for these difficult conversations in the community? Conversations about care, healing, what hurts us, what our strengths are in one community or another, etc.

How do your experiences as a community organizer connect to your alignment with what we’re trying to achieve at FLAC? Could you tell us about your journey to becoming a member of the Design Team?

You can probably guess, because of what you’ve heard about my background, that I have moved a lot, and I’ve been in contact with many different communities. I think, over time, this allowed me to develop the skill to bridge different realities. As a community organizer, bridging communities and creating networks of support and exchange—of ideas, information, etc.—is something that’s extremely important. I believe in the importance of acknowledging and respecting the particularities of distinct communities, but I also understand the need for collective change. As a cultural community organizer that works with women land defenders and environmental activists, one of the most important things I, we, have attempted is to understand where the needs of the communities are, and how different communities can support each other to address their needs.

When María Alejandra talked to me about the FLAC, I became interested because it’s an initiative that works at the intersection of gender and the environment—an area that is seldom supported. Usually, in philanthropy, foundations have their narratives, and they’re about discrete issues: gender, disabilities, climate change… So we need to create a mechanism that understands the particularities and intersectionalities of different groups so it can wisely and deliberately support these groups. Working with women land defenders, you come to see how crucial the work they do is, but they often aren’t understood by the climate or women’s movements, so it’s so exciting and important for us to create a space that does see and understand those intersections and how important it is to resource them.

I’m also very interested in learning and being part of collaborative processes. As activists, we tend to focus a lot on how we are different and on pointing at power dynamics, which is important, but it is equally important to get together and co-create something that works for people beyond us, something that works for more people, something that bridges needs and capacities. That’s what’s interesting to me about the FLAC and the reason I was so excited to come on board.

You are also a sound artist and have used your skills and knowledge in that field in your activism. Why focus on sound and narrative? What about this medium caught your attention and how is it uniquely suited to the kind of work you want to disseminate? Are there works/projects that you would like to share with the community?

When I was studying Human Ecology, my main focus was marine biology, and I got involved in a project that tracked changes in the songs of humpback whales in the Atlantic. We have known for a while now that over the years acoustic contamination, which is a product of human activity, has changed the songs of whales, and we found that this was also true for the area we were studying. Back then, I used to live on an island, and this had a huge impact on me because every now and then we’d find a beached whale on the shore. When we did the autopsies, we found that their hearing system, which is so important to them, was completely destroyed. Since the noise in the ocean destroys their echolocation system, whales can’t find each other, have babies, or even eat. And, of course, they’re more likely to strand themselves.

The effects of acoustic contamination clearly go beyond whales and have a detrimental effect on other species and entire ecosystems, so I began trying to find ways to talk about this. I decided to do an exhibition that expressed, through sound, the tragedy of acoustic contamination and what it was doing to the whales. I came across R. Murray Schafer’s concept of soundscape, which is really connected to the anguish brought about by the irreversible loss of sounds tied to ecosystems.

My initial approach was very rooted in bioacoustics, but in time I began to adopt a more artistic perspective. I wanted to create installations and spaces to think about sound and its implications, and I slowly began to move away from my apprehension about all the sounds that were dying and keeping a record of them, and I began to take an interest in raising awareness about the importance of listening, creating listening spaces, and drawing people’s attention to the sounds of a space and how they change over time and what that means. I actually worked with my Kokonuko grandmother in my last year of college so we could record and do soundscapes of the region.

After a while, my interest shifted to include voices, and I transitioned to podcasts. This was also influenced by my indigenous upbringing because many indigenous cultures place a lot of importance on oral communication; very often, that’s how we pass down our history and lore. As a young indigenous woman who often had to travel, it became important for me to listen to these stories since I couldn’t always be with my community. So, that’s how I got into podcasts; that, and I wanted to create bridges between the old and the new ways.

Something that I became aware of as well is how western cultures rely mostly on sight, whereas indigenous cultures tend to be more aural. In the Amazon, the landscape is so rich and complex that it isn’t easy to direct your sight to one particular thing, so we listen. Perhaps a birdsong can tell us something that our eyes can’t. All of these realizations drove me to become a sound artist and a sound activist; I wanted to create spaces for all of these sounds and highlight the importance of sound in our lives and its capacity to bridge cultures. Sometimes, when you watch a video and see someone’s face who looks different from you, you immediately separate yourself from them, but sound has the ability to evoke certain feelings, so if you listen to someone feeding their chickens, maybe that’s an experience or a memory that you can relate to as well, and this creates an emotional bond. That’s the beauty and the power of sound; it hits you emotionally more than it does mentally; it strengthens the bridges of empathy and solidarity. Also, listening to these sounds stimulates our imagination because we have to fill in the blanks, and what we need right now is more imagination. We need spaces for imagining things that haven’t been imagined yet so we can branch out of the path we’ve been walking, which isn’t serving us well.

I get really excited talking about this topic! So, anyways, Daniela Fontaine, from Mexico, and I co-created Radio Savia. Radio Savia is a podcast about women land defenders in Latin America who work at the intersection of environmental activism and collective care. Something that is very important for Radio Savia is to honor the sounds of the territories, so we have a space for soundscapes and listen to how the land sounds in the places where these women live. We also wanted to focus on the narratives that gave strength, hope, and luminosity to the work being done in the communities, especially since mass media tends to revictimize women land defenders and paint them as criminals in their coverage. We wanted to show our side and highlight the care for life, the love for the communities, and the strength of our hope.

This is why Radio Savia has a narrative approach; we want to strengthen the communities’ narratives for themselves and for others. We chose radio because it's a medium with a great reach in Latin America, but we’ve also made use of WhatsApp and Telegram groups to distribute the podcast. In this way, we can affirm and center local references, references that are closer to home. Sometimes, in the climate justice movement, the references that are circulated have very little to do with our realities: polar bears, Greta Thunberg… They’re great, but they are removed from our everyday context, so they can’t honor the cosmologies of all the peoples of the world. Centering these perspectives strengthens the climate justice movement immensely because we’re also disseminating solutions that the communities have created in response to the climate crisis, and they’re very much “alive” solutions, which diversifies our understanding of what solutions can look like and gives us hope because they’re already being put into practice and they work.

Let’s talk about Serbia. How did it feel coming to the space knowing you were the only member of the Design Team at that point? Were you apprehensive? Excited? Happy? And after getting to know many of your FLAC colleagues, how do you feel now? What does the future of the FLAC look like? How do you want to contribute to that future?

I wasn’t sure what it was going to be like. At some point, I felt a bit apprehensive: Am I gonna be looked at as the activist in the room? What would that mean? Sometimes these dynamics of representation don’t sit right with me because I don’t feel that I should represent a lot of people whom I don’t know. But I was pleasantly surprised when I arrived at the space because I felt very listened to as a person, a person that comes with a background, yes, but I could feel genuine interest from the other community members to forge a bond with me on a very human level. And this was a huge relief. For me, being listened to is very important. Also, I cherished the opportunity to listen to others as well because that’s what we’re doing. This is a very complex learning process. I’ve never worked at a foundation, so I have a lot to learn and digest, which can be challenging, but I find it all very, very interesting nonetheless.

I was very encouraged when I got there, and I could tell that this was a space that wanted to radicalize and diversify the ways in which Funds have worked so far. People’s willingness and excitement about this mission were very compelling to me.

I am also deeply honored by the role that I’m playing. This is a role that opens up a lot of possibilities, including bringing in voices and ideas to the space that are novel. We get to design a path to the kind of change we want to see become a reality; we get to experiment with different ways of doing.

It’s a lot of work because we need to understand and experiment with a lot of things. Sometimes it will work; sometimes it won’t, but it’s an exciting challenge that will allow us to imagine new paths forward. I’m truly looking forward to meeting the other members of the Design Team; I hope we can all get started with this journey soon.

What do you do in your spare time? What kind of music do you listen to? Do you do sports? What sports do you do?

In my spare time, I really enjoy being surrounded by nature. I might walk to the moors in the mountains, or perhaps a sacred lake or river where I can meditate. I also really enjoy making herbal medicine. I have plants at home, and I like collecting more; I use them to make ointments, oils, and tinctures. I’ve been using my spare time to learn more about traditional medicine.

I don’t have a non-human companion, but a lot of my relatives do, so I’ve taken care of my fair share of cats and dogs when I’m available. I really love them; I get on well with animals. Well, plants count as non-human companions, too, so I guess I have a lot. I have lavender, tobacco, ruda, aloe, etc.

I’m not especially good at sports, but I do love swimming; it connects me with water, which is my happy place. Whenever I’m in water, I’m the happiest person around. I am also a big lover of food. I think I love all kinds of food, but I really love mixing things that have a kind of sticky consistency, if that makes any sense! Like rice with vegetables and feta cheese–I love feta cheese so much. I do enjoy dancing, but I’m not a salsa person; I’m a lot more into contemporary dance. Oh, and I really, really, really love singing!