Open the Gates

The Process

Nilafunge Konun is a poetic collaboration between Catrileo+Carrión Community and The Glad Scientist, merging digital technology, ritual, and ancestral memory through immersive video and sound. Presented as a meditative audiovisual journey, the piece is guided by the nonbinary spirit of nature, evoking the blurred boundaries between the seen and the unseen.

The work features a 3D environment generated using conceptual prompts interpreted by LumaAI—an experimental AI system in beta (at the time of creation). Embracing the abstract results as a metaphor for how humans relate to the spirit world, the digital landscape becomes a space of glimpses and echoes. The terrain itself is woven procedurally, drawing on the collective’s weaving practice to create paths that honor both ancestral memory and speculative futures.

The journey through this terrain was recorded live, capturing a sense of real-time navigation through ritual space. The process reflects a shared approach to storytelling, where digital and physical experiences merge to craft an offering of resistance, care, and transformation.

This project was filmed in Lafkenmapu (Mapuche territory, southern Chile) and incorporates a Mapuzugun translation of the poem featured in the video, honoring the territory and its language.