“Source Code” is part of The Indigenous Project, a series that shines a light on some of the world’s last remaining indigenous tribes and their ongoing fight to preserve their traditions and way of life. My vision is that one day these extraordinary stories and people will be gathered and celebrated together in a single exhibition. Each piece carries a hidden doorway: the QR code woven into the artwork. By scanning it, you’ll uncover the deeper background behind the work and the larger journey of The Indigenous Project.

This artwork is rooted in a photograph taken by the artist during an encounter with one of the last remaining indigenous tribes of Papua. The man portrayed sits close to the earth, dressed in ceremonial adornments, his body marked by traditions that have survived across centuries. The tribe’s attire includes the penis gourd, a striking cultural symbol worn with pride, speaking both to identity and to continuity. Until not long ago, these same people were known for their practices of ritual cannibalism, a reminder of the deep, complex, and sometimes unsettling layers of human history that still echo in the present.

The work is titled Source Code because it seeks to uncover the origins of human society, our shared “programming,” so to speak, hidden in customs, rituals, and survival strategies that have shaped humanity long before modernity. The intense digital coloration of the image reimagines the photograph as something alive in two worlds: the natural and the technological. Just as computer code underlies every digital reality, these traditions hold the raw architecture of human existence.

The painting also contains a second reality. What is seen in daylight, an image of presence, ritual, and strength, is only part of the whole. Under UV light, another clandestine layer is revealed, evoking the unseen truths of indigenous life: the fragile balance between survival and extinction, memory and forgetting, visibility and disappearance. Integrated into the composition, QR codes function as literal keys to more knowledge, linking the viewer directly into the deeper background of the project and the stories it preserves.

In Source Code, the visible and the hidden coexist, reminding us that beneath every surface lies another world, waiting to be revealed, if only we choose to look.