Lorena Salas (1983) is a visual anthropologist, sociologist, filmmaker, and cultural organizer. Her practice unfolds at the intersection of art, research, and activism, centering collaborative, transdisciplinary, and intersectional approaches. For over a decade, she has worked closely with Amazonian, rural, and migrant communities, developing self-representation and artistic co-creation processes as strategies of resistance to systemic violence, displacement, and extractivism.

Turminta is a transdisciplinary co-creation project with Kichwa communities in Ecuador that explores, through a relational ontology, more-than-human connections with natural phenomena such as storms. Using sound art, sensitive technologies (DIY microphones, hydrophones, sensors), and speculative devices, it activates vernacular knowledge that recognizes thunder, water, and storms as living, communicative beings. Inspired by the thinking of Eduardo Kohn and the Kawsak Sacha (Living Forest) worldview, the project proposes deep listening as a way of engaging in dialogue with non-human intelligences.

By connecting distant territories through the shared flow of water, Turminta weaves together cosmologies, languages, and collective memories, fostering an ethics and aesthetics of care in the face of extractivist logics that threaten ecosystems and ancestral ways of life.

Turminta is a collective practice of attentive listening, observation, and connection with the natural world. In this living universe, the forest is a sentient and thinking being, and each storm carries a message, a warning, a memory. Preserving these knowledges is essential—they are part of a sensitive and ancestral memory that resists erasure and must endure.