Beyond Words: Arts-Based Research Methods as an Intercultural Bridge for Work With Indigenous Women in Peru

This commentary examines two arts-based techniques, Image Theatre and drawing, used in a participatory project carried out in 2025 in Condorcanqui, an Amazonian province of Peru, with 12 Awajún and Wampís leaders and 12 state workers. Spanish fluency, literacy and institutional position were unevenly distributed among participants, so purely verbal formats would have given fluent and institutionally positioned participants a structural advantage in defining what counted as a problem and as valid knowledge. We examine how embodied and visual work redistributed that advantage and what became visible through it: divergent constructions of Indigenous women's leadership and epistemic tensions between biomedical and ancestral understandings of health. We argue that arts-based methods produced the material the analysis rests on and in that sense operated as decolonial research practices.