What is this?
A territory under construction
This space is not a series of blog posts. Nor is it an archive. Or a collection of publications.
It's a territory. A way of thinking about knowledge, memory, meanings, sounds and silences.
I work with libraries, archives, metadata, flutes, ruins, instruments that sing, technologies that organize, and with everything that remains outside, in that diffuse space that some call the margins and that I call home.
Here there are writings, experiments, ideas, explorations, gestures, few solutions and many doubts. Because nothing is closed. Everything is to be traced. And, for someone like me, that is excellent news.
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.]
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Blogs
Chronicles of a biblio-naturalist | The most recent post
The Grammar of Tools
| Silenced Knowledges and Memories in the Tropics (07) | Published: June 19, 2025 |
The archive has no syntax for tools — and so it misreads. What if baskets, traps, and paddles were not utilities but literacies, erased by taxonomy and glass?
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All the posts of the blog
Blog The Log of a Librarian | The most recent post
A Line in the Shelves
| Decolonizing my Library (15 of 15) | Published: June 17, 2025 |
Not all preservation is protection. Sometimes, it's possession. This post confronts the colonial scaffolding of library collections and imagines what revolutionary stewardship might look like — grounded in refusal, relation, and repair.
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All the posts of the blog
Critical notes | The most recent post
Reading Is Queen
| Dealing with Literocentrism (01 of 10) | Published: June 13, 2025 |
A literate library doesn't just open books — it closes doors. When reading becomes virtue, everything else has to ask for permission..
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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.
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