Earth Tones is a MUSÉ project that engages youth from the Arhuaco and Kogi indigenous communities. The project takes place in the Sierra Nevada of Santa Marta region in the Northern coast of Colombia. 

A series of gatherings in strategic locations, deep in the heart of the Sierra Nevada territory, where communities practice and safeguard the rich ancestral knowledge of their culture.  

Youth partake in a workshop where each participant makes ceramic ocarinas, and learns to make sounds with them; the sounds of peace from the Sierra Nevada. 

Accompanying the artistic process of making their own wind instruments, the Earth Tones team engages participants in reflecting on the theme of inner peace and how their way of understanding and interacting with the world could help humanity find peace.  

Earth Tones will find permanent and transitory homes to these art pieces, sparking conversations about peace and the relevance of the indigenous point of view.

The gatherings will be filmed, producing content that will also help reach a wider audience, and therefore reflecting back to the indigenous youth the tremendous power of their voice. 

Earth Tones operates in thoughtful conversation with the ‘Mamos’ (spiritual leaders), teachers and artisans, resulting in genuine and meaningful engagement at many levels of the community. 

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Overcoming historic challenges over centuries, the Arhuaco and Kogi people thrive today in an impressive demonstration of resilience that delivers a vibrant philosophy and worldview to the XXI Century.  

Earth Tones’ team of educators includes musician/scholar Luis Fernando Franco who has devoted over 30 years to studying ancestral wind instruments of Colombia and has received explicit permission by the spiritual leaders to share his knowledge with the youth and with the wider world.  

Hand built ocarinas produce tones of a timbre  and frequency specific to that individual instrument, giving us a sort of signature sound from each participant.  According to the ‘mamos’, the thoughts of an artisan practicing a craft, e.g. a weaver making a garment, or a a luthier making an instrument, will imbue the object with the meaning of such thoughts.  The tones that these ocarinas produce will reflect their mindful construction and their sound will contain their message of peace to the world.