My collaboration with María Amilbia Siagama Siagama began 15 years ago, when I met her daughter in the streets of Bogotá, and continued into the mountains of Risaralda. It has been driven by curiosity, the desire to know one another, and learning to accept the opacity and misunderstandings that run through our relationship.

Our joint project, ADUA, takes its title from the Embera word for “I don’t know”—an embrace of uncertainty that offers a form of kinship that doesn’t erase difference, but learns to live with and through it. It also makes space for what does not need to be translated or explained.

My conversations with María Amilbia led me to the Benakúa ceremony, where men of knowledge drink a preparation made from the Brugmansia flower and travel to the underworld. For the Emberá, getting drunk and dreaming are intertwined: seeing and dreaming can become the same experience. What interested me was this idea of “knowing through forgetting.” What would it mean to forget the ways we had learned to see Indigenous communities? For me, it meant forgetting myself, opening myself to others, and allowing dreaming to become a way of seeing.

At the heart of ADUA is the Brugmansia, or iguaka, a sacred plant understood by the Emberá Chamí as a spiritual master and companion species. Its downward-facing flowers are associated with the world beneath us, a realm of knowledge and wisdom. In the Benakúa ceremony, the journey to this underworld can bring back guidance for tending the territory.

In these images, the Brugmansia becomes a kind of satellite between worlds—between seeing and dreaming, knowing and forgetting, memory and belief. It is through the flower that ADUA asks how we might encounter one another without needing to make everything fully known.