Conferences | The most recent
Living libraries in Latin America
| Lecture by Edgardo Civallero | Published: October 22, 2025 |
A complete version of the text presented at the Provincial Meeting of Libraries of Cachapoal (Rancagua, Chile, 23.Oct.2025). This work is published here for reading and discussion.
This talk reimagines rural libraries as living systems — adaptive, fragile, and deeply rooted in the territories they serve. It traces how imported management models collide with local realities, exposing the colonial scaffolding of "modernization" and revealing instead a quiet, persistent intelligence born of care, improvisation, and ecological interdependence. A journey through the South's smallest libraries, where management becomes translation, structure becomes respiration, and survival itself becomes a political act.
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All conferences can be found in the section Cajón de sastre.
Navsuv | The Bi-Weekly Summary
| Published: November 02, 2025 |
What if the archive could mourn, the forest could catalog, and the screen could unlearn the page? New writings on grieving metadata, ecosemiotic archivistics, and digital literocentrism — exploring the thresholds between inscription, ecology, and simulation, covering the period 20 Oct–02 Nov 2025.
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Blogs
Chronicles of a biblio-naturalist | The most recent post
Nothing Stands Alone
| Ecosemiotic Archivistics from the Cloud Forest (03) | Published: November 7, 2025 |
Beneath the forest floor, a hidden syntax binds life together — roots, fungi, and memories trading meaning through threads of relation. Each signal is a story of survival, each decay a beginning. What if our archives learned to remember like this?
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All the posts of the blog
Blog The Log of a Librarian | The most recent post
Micro-Thesauri and Relational Logics
| Metadata as Revolt (07) | Published: November 04, 2025 |
Every catalog is a map of power. This post imagines what happens when we redraw it from below — when meaning sprouts in small, local vocabularies that speak like seeds and connect like roots. From micro-thesauri to relational logics, it envisions a metadata that grows instead of rules.
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All the posts of the blog
Critical notes | The most recent post
Digital Literocentrism
| Dealing with Literocentrism (08 of 10) | Published: October 31, 2025 |
Libraries celebrate digitization as revolution, yet what they offer is often a copy — the book in digital drag. Their platforms expand access only to what was already written, cited, domesticated. The sonic, the gestural, and the lived remain outside the frame. As long as the format changes but the logic stays textual, the digital library will not liberate anything — it will only repeat its own reflection.
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All the posts of the blog
Cajón de sastre | The most recent post
Nemboro. The Power of Fictions
| Series of 6 posts | Published: September 23, 2025 |
Three hundred woven faces stared back with empty eyes, carrying stories of ritual, protection, and transformation. At first, they seemed like ancestral masks — but what if they were documents, texts woven in fiber and dye? This series traces the enchantment of encountering the so-called nemboro in Panama, and the unsettling realization that even invented artifacts can shape archives, markets, and memory. From seduction to rupture, from object to ontology, these posts explore how librarianship itself becomes entangled in fictions — and why even myths leave metadata behind.
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All the posts of the blog
Key topics
Insurgent Epistemologies and Decolonialism
Displaced, denied, illegible ways of knowing. Produced and remembered by force. Thought from the South, from the margin, and from the undocumented cry. What doesn't fit in the archive. Memory that doesn't ask permission.
→ Read moreCritical Semantics and Library / Archive Composting
Composting "dead" libraries and archives so that something different can emerge from them: transforming rigid structures into living, dynamic systems capable of nurturing new forms of knowledge. Knowledge technologies serving other logics based on connectivity, decentralization, and respect for epistemological diversity. Unexpected connections, unsuspected weavings. Modeling the world without replicating its violence, building data architectures that acknowledge power, context, and resistance.
→ Read moreWeaving of Memories and Meanings to Produce New Knowledge
Weaving with memories, remnants, and gestures. Binding fragments to build something greater. Making objects, publications, and tools that carry memory inside. It's not about representation — it's about embodiment. Every form is also a form of knowing.
→ Read moreMargins, Epistemic Justice, and Othered Documents
Othered knowledges and memories. Documents that go unnamed. Orality, graffiti, basketry, ceramics, textiles, hairstyles, territory — archives without paper. The equality of knowledge systems. Ecologies of knowing, non-hegemonic epistemic networks. Working in the margins is how the center is made.
→ Read moreSounds and Silences
Musical instruments as archives. Soundscapes as libraries. Songs, noises, echoes, vibrations — ways of recording the unspeakable. And the silences that scream. Listening is also a way of archiving.
→ Read moreA territory under construction
This space is not a portfolio. It is not an academic site, a professional showcase, or a digital CV.
It is a woven landscape — uneven, layered, and sometimes opaque. Here, libraries, classification, silence, memory, and broken epistemologies intertwine — not as topics, but as tensions.
There is no clear structure. Some threads will vanish. Others will echo later. You are not expected to follow everything — only to listen.
Nothing here is optimized. Not for search engines. Not for clicks. Not for legibility. This is not where you scroll. This is where you stop.
My name's Edgardo Civallero. Welcome to my website.
[A central part of my current work—focused on researching, classifying, and documenting musical instruments as carriers of memory and epistemic devices—is gathered at Instrumentarium, a site I created and lead as Edgardo Civallero. There, I explore instruments as living documents, experiment with alternative taxonomies, and propose new ways of listening to and narrating the world.]
Read my complete profile...