Young People and Audiovisual Technologies in Rural Chiloé/Buta Wapi Chilwe: A Personal Path toward a Decolonizing Doing

The aim of this essay is to present my experience attempting to practice some ideas of decolonial thinking within a doctoral research project. In 2010, I lived in a Williche Community in Chiloé/Buta Wapi Chilwe. As a retribution for the possibility of conducting my research there, I fulfilled several tasks defined by the Community’s Health Team. A project revolving around expressive creation with children and teenagers arose: The Weche Folil. After presenting some key features of my personal trajectory and those of the regional context in which Weche Folil is grounded; I propose to think of this project as a practice that points toward the subversion of ways of thinking, feeling and being which express the colonial dimension. I understand coloniality as a key dimension of our collective existence featured by inequality, arrogance, and pain. Love, time, dedication and caring are at the hearth of this decolonizing doing. Ambivalences, contradictions and paradoxes are also part of it. This personal account may be of interest for researchers who are planning to work among indigenous peoples, especially in rural settings and in Chiloé.

decolonial thought and doing; indigenous youth; audiovisual technologies