1A place to begin

Welcome. My name is Edgardo Civallero. I am a librarian, archivist, writer, researcher, musician, and naturalist. My work connects knowledge systems, cultural memory, the musical instruments of Latin America, and ecology. I write from Quisquiza, among the mist, cloud forest, and páramo of Cundinamarca, Colombia, where I also care for and restore native Andean forest.

For more than twenty-five years, I have written books, essays, chronicles, and scholarly work; designed semantic and documentary infrastructures; and worked with libraries, archives, museums, scientific collections, and communities across Latin America. My projects bring together classification, memory, sound, territory, and living systems, with particular attention to forms of knowledge that conventional institutions fragment, silence, or fail to recognize.

• Read my work
• Explore my fields
• Invitations
• About and contact

2Four paths through my work

3Last Threads

From Quisquiza | Monoculture

Published August 7, 2026

The latest post in my blog Critical Notes, "From Quisquiza | Monoculture," explores the spread of kikuyu grass across the slopes of Quisquiza. It examines how this species occupies the ground and simplifies ecological diversity while maintaining an appearance of order and stability, and asks what this kind of uniformity can reveal about institutional and intellectual systems. The text argues that efficiency and homogeneity can conceal a loss of resilience: when a system has only one structure, one method, or one response available, any change in conditions can expose its fragility.

4Chronicles of Things Made

A log of recent writings, sounds, and gestures

Published August 9, 2026

Between July 27 and August 9, four new pieces move through community education, Mangyan poetry, slime molds, and a kikuyu-covered slope in Quisquiza. They are very different texts, but each looks at the forms through which knowledge, memory, coordination, and life are made possible — and at what happens when those forms become too rigid, too permanent, or too uniform.

Libraries as Tools for Radical Education asks what changes when people cease to be recipients of information and become investigators of a situation they need to understand. The Poem Written on Bamboo follows Hanunóo Mangyan Ambahan and Surat Mangyan across bamboo, voice, memory, social exchange, and archival preservation, where no single object or medium contains the whole tradition. The Organism with No Body turns to Physarum polycephalum to think about temporary forms of coordination that can assemble around a problem, change with it, and disappear without surrendering memory or responsibility. From Quisquiza | Monoculture begins with the spread of kikuyu grass and asks what ecological uniformity can reveal about institutions and intellectual fields that become efficient by making other forms increasingly difficult.

Across the four pieces, the recurring concern is what structures make possible, what they exclude, and when they need to change. A lesson, a script, a network, a landscape: in each case, form is part of what happens, rather than a neutral container around it.

5Recently published

6Collected Texts, Sounds & Traces

7Invitations and collaborations