From handwoven art to AI, UVA helps preserve Guna culture

Helicopters heading north from Colombia to Panama regularly fly over the Darién Gap, a stretch of swamps, dense jungle and mountains spanning parts of both countries. The frequent flights can be noisy and unsettling for those on the ground.

To assuage her fears, a girl in a Guna village – the name of the Indigenous group in the Darién – turned to a centuries-old practice to protect herself.

“The sound of the helicopters could be very annoying; sometimes it could signal that paramilitary groups were going to be passing through in a day or two,” explained Rolando Vargas, an assistant professor of art history at the University of Virginia. “Making a mola was a healthy strategy to stop having nightmares about the helicopters.”

Guna women and girls have been weaving molas – a kind of textile – since the mid-19th century. Making molas, whose patterns and colors can vary widely, is a critical cultural practice and means of exchange. 

For a Guna woman, wearing one is part of being appropriately dressed. They can be woven to serve a variety of functions, from warding off bad luck to conveying certain spiritual beliefs. 

Art history professor Rolando Vargas, left, and Lisa Blackmore, director of the Digital Humanities Center, pose for a photo in Shannon Library, near the Digital Humanities Center space. (Photo by Matt Riley, University Communications)

But the handmade garments aren’t restricted to the Guna community. Women sell them to Westerners, fetching high prices for especially beautiful or intricate designs.

“They’re layered garments, and they cluster the layers, so you can see different parts of the fabric underneath. The designs can be related to the environment, or sometimes they’re more abstract,” Slenka Botello, a UVA art history doctoral student, said.

Vargas shows various molas and other Guna cultural objects to a group at the Digital Humanities Center. (Photo by Matt Riley, University Communications)

Botello and Vargas are working to create 3D scans of molas and other Guna artifacts for a digital museum exhibition to be hosted online, in consultation with Indigenous collaborators in the Darién. A Team Fellowship from UVA’s Digital Humanities Center and Data Analytics Center supports the work, including a project to use AI to transcribe Guna. Like many Indigenous languages, Guna is rarely written down, though Vargas mentioned some Spanish priests worked to translate Bibles into the language.

“The idea is to train an artificial intelligence model to help with this speech recognition into text, and that requires a significant data set,” Lisa Blackmore, the faculty director of the Digital Humanities Center, said. “This project is a great example of how AI can be used in experimental and creative ways as part of socially engaged research.”

A wooden comb, a Guna artisan crafted, is among the objects Vargas brings to UVA. (Photo by Matt Riley, University Communications)

Vargas and Botello’s goal is to help reconnect Guna communities with their cultural heritage, and ultimately to repatriate artifacts abroad. Although the Darién can be difficult to access for people unfamiliar with the terrain, the Guna people are not isolated, Vargas said. They have extensive contact with other groups, including Western collectors and scholars in Siena, Italy, where UVA has a study-abroad program. Their proximity to the Panama Canal also promotes cultural and economic exchange.

“There are all of these interesting materials written about the Guna in Italian, in Spanish, in Swedish, in English – but not in Guna, so I’ve been putting together this puzzle,” Vargas said.

He learned about a collection of Guna artifacts from his Italian colleagues. For decades, a collector in Florida kept as many as 3,000 artworks in Guna in a storage facility. A small portion of the items was documented in a book published in 2026, but there was still the problem of getting the book to the Guna people and preserving it. 

The Darién Gap often experiences 90% humidity, which keeps the fibers in paper and textiles constantly swollen with water and stressed, causing them to degrade faster. Digital preservation offers a way to preserve the cultural artifacts and reconnect the Guna with their heritage.

“It’s so important to help people outside academic institutions reach this knowledge, and put this community in touch with the collection,” Botello said. 

Botello, a Fulbright Scholar at UVA, primarily works on digitizing molas and other aspects of Guna culture and translating them into a website. 

“These are three-dimensional objects, and they need to be represented that way, because they have this significance to their community,” Botello said.

The website will also host audio recordings of Guna people talking about the objects they and their relatives have made, echoing a Guna practice. During the 1980s, to communicate with someone in another village, people sometimes recorded themselves on a cassette tape and sent it to them rather than writing a letter. It’s a lower-tech way to send someone a voice memo.

“It’s an amazing experiment, as an artist and a scholar. I have never seen something so personal, but historically significant. When I took the book with me to the Darién, people viewed it as a photo book of objects that their relatives had made during the 20th century,” Vargas said.