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

A Hole Older Than the Words

Published October 23, 2026

My latest post in my blog The Log of a Librarian, "A Hole Older Than the Words," explores how Ethiopian manuscripts were made, from preparing parchment to sewing and binding books. It examines the holes, repairs, and other physical traces that reveal the work of manuscript makers, and introduces the scribes of Ləggat, who continued producing handwritten parchment books in the twenty-first century. The post offers a glimpse into a remarkable bookmaking tradition and the transmission of its skills across generations.

4Chronicles of Things Made

A log of recent writings, sounds, and gestures

Published October 18, 2026

Between October 5 and 18, four new pieces consider the difficult relationship between what can be recorded and what can be understood. They move from the protective value of leaving certain things undocumented to the selective remembrance preserved in medieval manuscripts, then to the coordination of incomplete knowledge and the difficulty of recognizing processes that unfold beyond administrative calendars.

The Library as a Community Sanctuary examines how libraries can reduce the pressures experienced by people in vulnerable circumstances through privacy, continuity, and institutional restraint, including decisions not to collect information or turn people's experiences into evidence of institutional success. Armenian Colophons and the Work of Remembrance explores the names, relationships, and circumstances preserved in medieval Armenian manuscripts, showing how these records commemorated certain contributors while leaving others outside the written account. No Bird Sees the Whole Sky draws on studies of homing pigeons to examine collective navigation, conflicting information, and unequal leadership, considering what these dynamics might suggest for collaborative searches across dispersed archives. Finally, From Quisquiza | Time begins with the uneven growth of young Andean trees to question how institutional reporting cycles and performance indicators can misrepresent processes whose development follows different timescales.

5Recently published

6Collected Texts, Sounds & Traces

7Invitations and collaborations