Amauta, Challapampa

Amauta, Challapampa is a visual narrative created on Isla del Sol, in Lake Titicaca, at 4,075 meters on the Andean plateau. It follows, over the course of a single day, the spiritual geography of Faustino, the last Amauta of the island.

Faustino is 56 years old and venerates a god called Sun. As a child, in the village of Challapampa, he was struck by lightning. This event, recognized by the community as a sign of passage, inscribed him within a lineage of ancient knowledge. He became an Amauta, like his father—who, in Aymara culture, is not simply a shaman-priest, but a sage, a moral guide, a teacher. In the realm of the Andean cordillera, the Amauta is the custodian and interpreter of the relationship between land, body, and cosmos.

One single sensitive material for one single cycle of light. The twelve photographs that compose the project were taken during a single solar day, on one single negative. The intention was therefore not to accumulate images, but rather to follow a slow ritual, deliberately restrained, governed by the Amauta’s sacred time.

Every morning at dawn, Faustino departs from Challapampa and, walking along the Sun’s sacred path of eternity, reaches his ancestral spaces: rocks, mountains, forests, and ceremonial sites built over 4,000 years ago by a lost culture known as Tiwanaku. During these long journeys, his only companion is a small battery-powered radio—the sole human artifact in a suspended landscape dominated by the elements.

The project explores this same suspension, where ritual, body, and island share a single, indivisible time. Amauta, Challapampa does not document a shamanic practice; rather, it seeks to inhabit its space-time.

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