Only the River Remains to Speak. Multimedia exhibition to promote and support the rights and cause of the Lower Omo Valley indigenous peoples

Project summary

“I have one question for you – what I am asking is – is this river, where we plant our food, where we catch our fish, will this continue or will we lose this farming land and water for the future? If you know, will you share with me? We have no say. Nobody comes and explains to us. We have no future.”

Houtil Naranya, Dassanech matriarch, Kara Women Speak

The cooperation between Jane Baldwin, Studio Azzurro Produzioni, Survival International (Italy) and Archi.Media Trust Onlus for the creation of this multimedia exhibition was developed from the common will to give voice to the peoples of the Omo Valley and Lake Turkana, in Ethiopia and Kenya, and to enlighten the environmental and human rights issues that threaten them. At the core of this advocacy initiative is photographer Jane Baldwin’s work Kara Women Speak, a project that represents over ten years of field-research, documenting the women of the Omo in their own voices and capturing the stories of issues that threaten their communities. With the cooperation of Studio Azzurro and the consultancy of Survival International (Italy), the images, the voices and the testimonies collected by Baldwin were edited and rendered in the multimedia, sensory rich and interactive exhibition Only the River Remains to Speak: a dense and compelling journey, combining the potential of new digital technologies with the materiality of raw matters, surfaces and objects, making them receptive and reactive to the gestures of the visitors. Aim of exhibition is telling a present-day story of a river and of the peoples that it sustains, narrated in their own voices, to raise awareness about the violations of tribal peoples’ human rights, calling for the protection of their ancestral knowledge and ways of life. Only the River Remains to Speak was exhibited from 1 October 2018 to 6 January 2019 at the Museum of Cultures – MUDEC of Milan.