We introduce you to these beautiful masks, by a group of artisans in Putumayo, Colombia, from the Kamënts̈á indigenous culture. They are the sons and daughters of the stars, who crashed here centuries ago becoming human. The wisest of them, who couldn’t go back to the sky to become a star again, married a woman from this land and taught her the language of the stars, giving birth to the Kamënts̈á community who still speaks that language. Oppressed by colonization and its violent ways, they slowly started going extinct, but they endured. 

They endured, mostly, through the art of their masks, that were initially carved with machetes and decorated with seeds and grains, and wanted to show the invader that he was not welcome and their indigenous identity burned brighter than the aggression they received.

The Kamënts̈á community, being reborn from the ashes, is recovering its traditions, language, attire, and ancestral knowledge of agriculture and sacred medicines. The masks, full of symbols that tell original stories of their cosmogony, are a way of immortalizing that knowledge.

These jaw-dropping masks, that always come in pairs (masculine and feminine energies) are made with around two thousand perfect cuts in the carving of a powerful facial expression, and an average of 270,000 millimetric beads, placed one by one with total precision in the workshop of these devoted craftsmen and women who want to make their story live forever. 

We want to help them in that endeavor. We want to help them take those stories to the rest of Colombia and the whole world, allowing them to get a fair pay for their work and investing a percentage of every sold pair in the workshop and the community. You are invited to join us in this mission.