Where the rivers meet, music is heard. Where the Rio Negro and Rio Solimões converge, the church tower bells can be heard; chiming away as the waters begin to rise. The sky meets the land, and water becomes the only medium between heaven and earth. In the cataclysm of the rising river and the down pouring rain, the calling of the far forest roars…and somewhere in the distance the shaman blows his horn. The lilies would dance, and choreographies of water would blossom from the quiet riverside. But, these are all fleeting moments of a storyteller’s imagination, memories and re-memories of a magical reality.

It is known that the temple, half submerged, half floating, above the Rio Negro’s surface was the home to he who would signal the beginning of the flood season. The skies would pour down, and the river would come to life. It is a regenerating cycle, like the Ouroboros, flushing out the old, and bringing life to a redefined ecosystem.

While the rain season reaches its peak between the months of February and May, the sun would hide behind the clouds, and let the moon take the center stage. It is when the shadow sun is full, that the rains would reach their highest and most explosive momentum.

There are stories and myths surrounding the temple of the Yaskomo, the shaman of the Wai-wai people. It’s difficult to discern where the fiction ends and the reality begins, but gradually we take it upon ourselves to prototype that metaphysical state that occurs between the physical space and its inhabitation, both past and current.

The operation of the structure is relatively simple, at least from this recovered diary that speaks of its past. It utilized a hydraulophonic principle; the same way air is used in a woodwind instrument, water is used in a central obelisk, operating an instrument based on river flow and rain levels.

Manatees and other animals local to the region such as the boto dolphins, would travel the rivers with the same mechanism embedded into their bodies; creating melodies based on the height of the river where they would find themselves.

My task thus lies in re-contextualizing the fluvial soundscape in our present day, in fabricating the biomechanical relationship between the human and the machine, reconciling the divide between the inanimate and the animate in the form of a totem and its accompanying ritual, an object and its outdated program.

Initial prototypes investigate the pure form of the horn, and the way its presence articulates the role of the user. Is it there to be blown, or is it there to be heard? What role does the shaman have today, and can we kill the idea of the user? The shaman would blow his horn, he would chant, and he would impose a hierarchy onto the ritual of soul flight. This is now outdated, abolished when the Wai-Wai tribe was converted to Christianity in the 1950’s along with the need of the Yaskomo shaman.

The totem hence is not a monument of the past but of what is to come. It is a speculation, which embraces the imagined fallibility of the machine, and objectives the Amazonian myth. The shaman has become the object, and the ritual now consists of a performative architecture that occurs once a year. The people along the Rio Negro must construct the totem once a year, and then burn it at the peak of the flood season. Its materiality embodies the fabric of textures scattered across the Amazon region, the decay and death that the river brings, along with the hope that new life will come as well.