AYNI: Ancestral Yearning for Nativist Entanglement is the world’s first Indigenous-led balloon launch ritual, co-conceived with Carlos Vega, a Yatiri of the Likanantay community, and enacted in the high-altitude expanse of the Atacama Desert. Rooted in ayni, a principle of ancestral reciprocity among humans, mountains, waters, celestial bodies, and more-than-human kin, this project engages the atmosphere as a site of ceremonial emergence and relational extension.

A solar-lifted balloon carries upward an offering of sacred materials: native seeds, volcanic salts, mineral dust, and woven cosmograms. The launch serves as an introduction, it is a declaration of presence, sovereignty, and intention to world’s otherwise. It signals the continuation of ancestral relation beyond the terrestrial, tracing cosmologies into the stratosphere.

AYNI affirms the sky as an archive of relational contact, and a participant in ceremony. The work frames ritual as infrastructure and atmosphere as a living, sentient medium through which Indigenous cosmotechnics extend their sovereignty, memory, and futurity. Through this act, the Likanantay community composes a new altitude of self-representation and agency, one carried by heat, salt, breath, and the careful lifting of Madre Tierra into sky.

Image 4: Aerocene