Chirri DAO: River Governance in Community

Combining different epistemologies like Indigenous wisdom and western science, Laura Fong Prosper uses blockchain in her project »Chirri Dao: River Governance in Community« as a tool for imagining new ways of collective stewardship. Tokens will become witnesses of human-water relations and an interactive multimedia archive gives insight into modes of interspecies solidarities outside economies of exploitation.

Laura Fong Prosper, Panama / Berlin, Germany — Jan. 28, 2026

The Ngäbe-Buglé are one of Panama’s largest Indigenous peoples, with deep ecological knowledge and strong traditions of caring for rivers, forests, and land. The project is named after Chirri, the Ngäbere word for »river« and it creates a cross-border living archive and community-led governance platform for the waters of the Comarca Ngäbe-Buglé in western Panama.

Tokens act as »water-witnesses« minted via clean-energy validators powered by solar, wind, or hydro systems and co-designed with the community using audiovisual traces: the movement and sounds of streams, Ngäbere water voices, and ritual gestures of flow.

A community-run DAO allows simple voting and transparent budgeting, sending all NFT income to river-care projects like cleanup teams, ecological monitoring, and cultural revitalization. The blockchain acts as a shared support system: Tokens show care for the river, enable collective decisions, and return benefits to the community.

The work blends underwater footage, archival material, and participatory recordings into a browser-based interactive platform. Visitors join the DAO through guided actions. The platform is planned to be open-source, trilingual, freely accessible for communities, researchers, and broader audiences and fully documented, imagining futures of water rights, kinship, and community technologies beyond extraction.