Masterpieces from the Ceramics Collection of Iñaki Etxeberri

A Documentary Film by Sarah Newman and Felipe Rojas

“All beings see (‘represent’) the world in the same way… But the things that they see are different: what to us is blood, is maize beer to the jaguar; what to the souls of the dead is a rotting corpse, to us is soaking manioc; what we see as a muddy waterhole, the tapirs see as a great ceremonial house.”

We are very pleased today to present the second in our series of participant projects from the Hinternet Summer School on “Scholarly Fabulation: Theories and Methods”, which took place in August, 2025.

Today’s project is a remarkable documentary film by Sarah Newman and Felipe Rojas on the life and work of Iñaki Etxeberri (1912-1994), born in Sparks, Nevada, the last in a long line of polymath Basque shepherds. Over the course of his life Etxeberri went on to make significant contributions to Amazonian anthropology, though likely his most intriguing legacy, and the focus of Newman and Rojas’s film, is the vast ceramic collection he left behind (not to mention the enigmatic sketches discovered in his notebooks).

All the ceramic artifacts in this film are part of the SERámicANIMAL exhibition currently on display at the Museo Arqueológico de Bogotá, Colombia (Cra. 6 #7-43), where t-shirts and tote bags with images of selected pieces in the collection are on sale. Neither the show nor the swag mention Etxeberri or his achievements.

Producido en Estudios “El torturador” en Bogotá entre el 17 y el 22 de agosto del 2025 para la Escuela de Verano de la Red tras la Red (“Hinternet Summer School”).