Glimpses of Emergence in the Ayoreo Video Project

Drawing upon scenes from a recent Indigenous video workshop in Paraguay, the essay details the emergent forms of perception, imagery, and experience that were unique to the video workshop form. The aim of the essay is to write present‐tense difference through such emergent visual forms rather than through increasingly common aesthetic frameworks of inevitable endings or cultural, technological, and economic determinisms. In doing so, the essay crafts a larger argument about how ethnographic attention to community video workshops and unauthorized Indigenous self‐imagery may offer correctives to the visual economies and political lexicons often presumed to define the present. It asks how Ayoreo remediations of self and world may charter novel axes for ethnographic writing and critique.