What is this?

What is this? A territory under construction. By Edgardo Civallero

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

Chronicles of a biblio-naturalist. The most recent post. By Edgardo Civallero

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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Blog The Log of a Librarian | The most recent post

Blog The Log of a Librarian. The most recent post. By Edgardo Civallero

When a Tool Is a Document

| The Taxonomy of Absence (07) | Published: June 24, 2025 |

Not all knowledge can be written. Some must be woven, carved, repaired. This post asks what libraries miss when they ignore tools as epistemic forms — and calls for a memory practice that reads with the hands as well as the eyes.

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Critical notes | The most recent post

Critical notes. The most recent post. By Edgardo Civallero

Sacred Shelves

| Dealing with Literocentrism (02 of 10) | Published: June 27, 2025 |

When the book becomes sacred, the shelf becomes an altar — and all other knowledge must kneel to be let in. In the quiet reverence of libraries, what is not written is too often unwelcome.

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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.

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Critical 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.

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Weaving 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.

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Margins, 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.

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Sounds 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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