Professor Ronaldo Vargas

Source: Thomas Hannaher, Briseida Iglesias, Cebaldo de León, Agar Tejada, and Charles Arias, Kuna Art Guna Art: The Remarkable Creations of a Central American Indigenous Culture (Geoversity Foundation, 2026)

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Cultural project to return a Kuna/Guna art collection from the US to Panama and Colombia.

We are in the early stages of a repatriation project, but it could become a meaningful initiative for Global Studies. The most challenging part will be understanding how the Kuna/Guna people prefer to receive these objects and manage the collection. A preliminary idea of building a museum for this collection might be a Western imposition that could create cultural strain; instead, the goal should be to consider and understand other ways the community interacts with their material history. For example, in the Colombian Amazon, the ethnographic Magütá museum loaned some of its objects for community use. This approach differs from Western museum practices, where objects are kept in display cases and are not meant to be handled. For the Magütá people, seeing their objects behind glass, unable to use them, is also unthinkable. A repatriation process is not only about returning cultural artifacts but also about restoring memory and promoting cultural healing. In my ecocinema class, we study a Sámi case of repatriation, and I am glad that we are already thinking beyond just objects and considering the broader processes of cultural repatriation.

Rolando Vargas is a media artist and scholar working with installation and digital media. He has a BFA in Fine arts from Universidad de los Andes, Colombia, received a Fulbright grant for his MFA in Intermedia and Digital Arts at the University of Maryland, and has a Ph.D. in Film and Digital media from the University of California, Santa Cruz. Rolando’s research «Kuna Indigenous Media and Knowledge in the Darién Tropical Rain Forest» focused on the politics of traversal and terrain, mapping and survival, and the geographies of collective labor and will as modes of indigenous resistance. Rolando has presented his work at Transmediale, the Kassel Documentary Film Festival, SESC Videobrasil, Rencontres Internationales Paris/Berlin, Kunstverein Düsseldof, EMAF, Ficvaldivia, and other international venues. In 2022, he received a Processing Foundation Fellow for promoting the use by Kuna children of P5.js language while reflecting on digital workflows and appropriating digital methods in their terms and world conceptions. You can read more about his latest project in Darién here.