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

Amplifying Local Voices in Global Spaces

Published September 22, 2026

The latest post in my blog The Log of a Librarian, "Amplifying Local Voices in Global Spaces," examines what happens when community knowledge circulates beyond its local context. It considers translation, institutional vocabularies, selective access, provenance, and reciprocity, asking how wider circulation can extend the reach of local knowledge without stripping it of the histories, conflicts, and relationships that give it meaning.

4Chronicles of Things Made

A log of recent writings, sounds, and gestures

Published September 20, 2026

Between September 7 and 20, four new pieces move through librarianship and solidarity, Yorùbá Ifá, termite mounds, and seedlings protected from the weather in Quisquiza. Their subjects are far apart, but each examines a different relationship between structure and what happens within it: how systems can organize, support, transmit, or coordinate without completely determining the people, knowledge, or living processes they sustain.

Librarians as Co-Conspirators asks what solidarity requires when professional decisions affect the risks and autonomy of communities, treating institutional position as a source of responsibility rather than authority over collective action. A Corpus in 256 Signs examines Ifá as a documentary system in which the stable architecture of the 256 odù coexists with an extensive and variable oral repertoire distributed among practitioners and activated through memory, apprenticeship, recitation, and interpretation. The City Built by Heat turns to termite mounds to explore distributed regulation, asking how local encounters with problems can leave consequential traces within large knowledge infrastructures. From Quisquiza | Protection begins with covers placed over vulnerable seedlings and follows the question into grants, pilot programmes, repositories, access restrictions, and other structures that may enable something to grow but can also become forms of dependency or control.

Across the four pieces, structure appears less as a container than as a relationship that has to remain responsive to what it organizes. A library, a corpus, a mound, a seedbed: each works differently, but none can be understood by looking at its formal architecture alone.

5Recently published

6Collected Texts, Sounds & Traces

7Invitations and collaborations