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

The Poem Written on Bamboo

Published July 31, 2026

The latest post in my blog The Log of a Librarian, “The Poem Written on Bamboo,” explores the ambahan poetry and Surat Mangyan writing tradition of the Hanunóo Mangyan of Mindoro. The essay examines how poems incised on bamboo move between writing, recitation, memory, and social exchange, and considers what happens when a living documentary practice enters museums, libraries, heritage programs, and digital collections. It argues that the poem cannot be preserved through the inscribed object alone: its continuity also depends on readers, voices, relationships, and communities capable of making the marks speak again.

4Chronicles of Things Made

A log of recent writings, sounds, and gestures

Published July 26, 2026

Over the past two weeks (July 13 to July 26), four new texts examined how institutions, communities, agreements, and forests endure. They move through different territories, but each asks where durable authority and continuity actually reside.

The Ethics of Representation in Community Libraries considers who controls the public record of a community. The Treaty That Had No Charter follows the pela alliances of the Central Moluccas, sustained through memory, ritual, and repeated practice rather than a founding document. The Forest Grows from Its Dead asks how obsolete documentary structures may become substrates for future systems. From Quisquiza | Succession connects cloud-forest restoration with institutional repair and the slow preparation of conditions for change.

Together, the four pieces suggest that continuity belongs less to stable objects than to relationships, practices, and forms of care capable of being renewed.

5Recently published

6Collected Texts, Sounds & Traces

7Invitations and collaborations