Johanna Alarcón finds an expansive view of Afro-descendant identity

“Ancestral territory is the memory that connects us to our mother. What does it mean to return to your mother? How does the relationship with your mother impact you as an individual and as a collective? How could you not want to know, embrace, and feel protected and loved by the one who gave you life?

The connection between women and territory is, in itself, the mystery that creates and sustains life in its essence and breadth. The diaspora was deterritorialized. That original territory, and the memory that inhabits it, was carried within the body. The importance of this connection is the bond between the human and the divine, the connection as a primary instinct that builds who we are and where we come from — a fundamental principle for knowing where we are going. In a historical context, the reunion is also resistance and return.

Although dispossession continues, the ways of sustaining this relationship through spirituality, culture, and orality revitalize the family from tenderness and collective care. Humanity’s memory is inscribed in the territory; if we are denied our own history, we are denied our identity.”

“Photography is more than a creative act or an image; it is a process that builds relationships. In a world marked by discrimination, violence, and structural racism, our relationships as diverse human beings have been broken. Photography offers the possibility of a re-encounter that allows us to open up, to listen, and to let stories—people—inhabit us, far from a dominant discourse. Images can break the illusion of individuality and help us navigates stories, transforming the everyday into an intimate expression of struggle, tenderness, and dignity.

The role of photography is essential for a multiplicity of stories to become shared territory where our identities are expressed freely and with dignity. Photography allows us to travel beyond time and space to recognize our collective history. For a long time, relationships were defined from otherness, superiority, and dispossession, using visual narration to establish that discourse. However, that same act is now being reversed to repair broken relationships from a common ground of encounter, understanding, and recognition.”

“This project is guided by the curiosity of an untold story. When I encountered the history of cimarronaje (maroon resistance), I asked myself: Why did I never know about these women? Why was the only thing I learned about Afro-descendant people framed through hypersexualization, sports, criminalization, etc.? I realized that this image was normalized in the society where I live. Listening to the experiences of women—friends, grandmothers, mothers, daughters—immediately connected me to this feeling.

Amadita Cortéz, an Afro-Ecuadorian poet and participant in the project, told me that cimarrona means ‘wild dog,’ a derogatory term enslavers used for those who escaped from the fields. The Afro-descendant community appropriated and re-signified this word, describing it as: the Black spirit that expresses itself against all acts of racism and discrimination. Cimarrona resistance took on particular characteristics in each region of the New World, but this story in particular led me to understand the untold history of Blackness, of racism and current practices, but also of spirituality as a form of cimarronaje.

In that sense, I first understood spirituality through ritual, but later I deepened my understanding of how that spirituality is expressed in the daily lives of women, their families, and communities—reaching Ubuntu, an African philosophical principle. And in that foundation, ‘I am because we are,’ I rooted my visual approach, with the intention of creating images that link body-territory, spirituality, and everyday life through the intimacy and candor of a long-term documentary project.”

“I faced the mountain, where my people turned away—guided like my ancestors by the moon’s watchful eye, the cicadas’ sacred rhythm, and the earth’s damp breath at the swamp’s edge. Fuga” – Roxan Jaramillo (Cimarrona of Ecuador, project participant, and Pan-African poet)

“I included these images based on the oral histories of cimarrona escapes. The landscapes and night skies represent the routes of maroon resistance. The stories of escape, told across generations and written in literature by authors like Angela Davis and Assata Shakur, describe many violations committed against enslaved bodies trafficked to the continent.

I went to the places where the diaspora arrived—such as sugarcane fields, plantations, and mines—and photographed those landscapes. The starry night represents ancestors, spirits, and Orishas. Alba Pavón, another project participant, says that when they were brought on the transatlantic voyage, they did not come alone—their Orishas came with them and guided them from the stars.”

“This project transformed me in many ways, and that is the power of documentary photography: it opens you to people when you open yourself to people. The stories cross through you, inhabit you, and change you. To me, the cimarronas are vital force—the ones who, as Ofelia Lara, a wise healer and project participant, says: “planted roses where there were only stones.”

I became infected with their rebellion, with the river and its songs, with the movement of their dances and the sound of the drum. Every element has meaning and was created for freedom. This story made me understand the importance of language, culture, territory, and resistance from the simplicity of life, from family and unity. To understand cimarronaje is to remember, to lovingly pass again through the heart of the ancestors’ stories: cimarronas and cimarrones who left a legacy of freedom.

The emptiness of folklorization is a way of invisibilizing the struggles, strategies, and codes that the diaspora created to preserve and reconfigure the humanity that enslavement tried to erase. I believe that daring to tell complex stories of identities, violence, or conflict invites you to explore your own vulnerability from a dignified and honest place; likewise, you connect with people and create consented stories-relationships.

Sometimes what drives us as visual storytellers is the outcome, and we leave the process aside. Allow yourself to connect with yourself and with the story, which implies rediscovering yourself to understand how each story wants to be told. That freshness and freedom you allow yourself is also the passion reflected in your work. Although immediacy and image overload are what most feed us, I invite you to be present and let photography connect with corporality, orality, and reciprocity—not only of the eye but of the story.”