Tourism to the Colombian Amazon draws visitors from all over the world to experience “the lungs of the world” and behold its original inhabitants. But for the Indigenous peoples who call this place home, the foreign gaze introduces a pressure to perform their traditional identities as relics of a romanticized past. Meanwhile, the conditions that allow for their cultural distinctness to endure are eroding under globalizing forces.

The series examines the struggle to hold onto generational wisdom and ancestral connection to the land and — “lo propio,” what is one’s own — while interrogating the photographer’s role as an outside observer. In a meta exploration, Hanna began the work from a personal question of positionality; is it possible to transcend legacies of exoticization to capture how a community understands itself against the eyes of the other?