Profile

About the site

Active since 2022, this site brings together the main areas of my professional and creative work: librarianship, archives, semantic consultancy, publishing, research on music and musical instruments, writing, art, and natural history.

Across these fields, my work examines how knowledge and memory are organized, preserved, communicated, and contested. It is grounded in social equity and the defense of cultures and the living world.

The site provides a common home for projects developed since 2000, including current initiatives and a record of earlier publications and online work. Each project retains its own identity and, where appropriate, its own independent platform.

Here you can browse my publications, learn about the projects I direct, and contact me regarding consulting, research, writing, editorial work, or other collaborations.

Workspaces & Worlds

Around this site orbit a series of interconnected workspaces — editorial, consultative, musical, artistic, and conceptual — each one a world of its own. Some are grounded in research, others in fiction, sound, design, or political critique. All emerge from the same impulse: to question how we think, create, and exist, and how we manage knowledge and memory of all kinds.

Some are autonomous platforms. Others live within this same domain. Together, they form a constellation of practices — unfolding across disciplines, languages, and terrains.

Tela de Araña is my independent studio for semantic and epistemic architecture, where I conduct my professional consulting and design work. It supports institutions, organizations, and collectives whose knowledge systems face complexity — whether through growth, dispersion of materials, evolving workflows, or the accumulation of legacy structures. The studio integrates diagnosis, structural design, semantic modeling, and editorial implementation to build durable, coherent, and adaptable ecosystems of knowledge and memory.

Wayrachaki Editora and El Zorro de Abajo Editora are self-managed, rebel publishing imprints that house work generally excluded from commercial and academic circuits. Wayrachaki Editora focuses on critical librarianship, rebellious archives, decolonial critique, and classification as resistance. El Zorro de Abajo Editora works with traditional music, instrument-making, sonic experimentation, and oral memory. Both produce digital, open-access publications as acts of archiving, persistence, and survival.

Marginalia is an experimental digital journal dedicated to libraries, archives, museums, and the politics of memory. It centers non-hegemonic perspectives, silenced narratives, and decolonial approaches. Built on a low-tech, high-clarity philosophy, it offers layered essays, visual and sonic pieces, hybrid formats, and annotations, supported by a dialogic editorial model that rejects hierarchical peer review.

Instrumentarium brings together my research and documentation on traditional musical instruments — especially those of Latin America — approached from organology, ethnomusicology, and memory studies. It treats sound-producing objects as documents carrying biological, geographic, historical, and cultural information. Its outputs include articles, books, pedagogical materials, recordings, exhibitions, workshops, and research, including a project on musical instrument classification.

Estudio paramuno is a creative and epistemic atelier rooted in the Colombian high-Andean forest. It is where I draw, paint, build instruments, design graphics, sculpt, weave, craft puppets, or write — a space where making becomes a way of thinking. Guided by an epistemology of absence and a sensibility for the fragile, I work with materials that whisper: bark, clay, bone, ash, thread, wood… And I also upcycle, recycle, and repurpose whatever is at hand. Low-tech tools and lo-fi methods shape artifacts, narratives, and experiments that emerge from mist, silence, and territorial memory.

The author

I am a semantic architect and biblio-naturalist with over twenty-five years of experience weaving memory, knowledge, and ecological thinking across scientific institutions, cultural archives, and community territories. Born in the Puerto de Santa María of Buenos Aires (Argentina) in 1973, and currently based between Bogotá and Quisquiza, in the Colombian Andes, I design infrastructures that allow scientific collections, archival records, and multilingual knowledge spaces to communicate without erasing the frictions, silences, or pluralities that give them meaning.

My path in Library and Information Science began in 1999 and deepened through a specialization in Southern Epistemologies and a Master's degree in Historical Archives and Memory — after earlier forays into biology and history, which still shape how I think and work. Over time, I moved beyond the rigid boundaries of conventional information work and into the unstable zones where systems break down: where metadata fails, classification collapses complexity, and archives either erase or overexpose the lives they contain. I operate in those interstices, designing semantic and epistemic architectures capable of holding multiplicity without flattening it.

My work integrates ontologies, metadata models, classification systems, semantic pipelines, linked data strategies, editorial architectures, and decolonial critique. I treat knowledge not as static content but as a living, relational ecosystem: one that requires infrastructures able to preserve boundaries, encode context, and enable translation without assimilation.

But I am also a maker. A writer, musician, illustrator, puppeteer, and creative technologist. I design systems, and I also build objects — from instruments and artifacts to stories and images. I translate complexity not only into essays and metadata, but into sound, movement, and image. Writing and classification, composition and curation: these are for me parallel acts of world-making.

This understanding is shaped by the many identities I have carried: librarian, archivist, blogger, professor, researcher, naturalist, storyteller, translator, and cultural worker. Each of them sustains my way of understanding knowledge as something territorial, sonic, embodied, ecological, and political.

Between 2018 and 2023, I worked in the Galápagos Islands, where biodiversity conservation, scientific history, citizen science, degrowth, traditional knowledge, and the preservation of fragile collections converged, and often collided. It was there, in the friction between species, coastlines, archives, and disciplines, that my identity as a biblio-naturalist took shape: an approach that reads ecosystems, soundscapes, libraries, and documentary collections as parallel infrastructures of memory, all of them intimately interwoven. That work continued across the mangroves, forests, and coral reefs of Panama, where I directed the Library & Archive of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (2024–2025), and goes on today in the mist-covered slopes of Quisquiza, where knowledge behaves like climate and memory circulates rather than settles.

Nowadays, I direct Tela de Araña, my consultancy in semantic and epistemic architecture; created and run Instrumentarium, my platform for studying musical instruments as documents; edit Marginalia, Wayrachaki Editora, and El Zorro de Abajo Editora; and make art and music through Estudio paramuno, a creative and epistemic atelier rooted in the high-Andean forest.

Across these spaces, I design strategies, infrastructures, and artifacts that challenge how knowledge is organized, preserved, and activated — guided by the conviction that memory is not what remains, but what resists, transforms, and refuses to disappear.

Invitations and collaborations

I welcome invitations and proposals from communities, grassroots organizations, editors, publishers, universities, libraries, archives, museums, cultural organizations, research groups, and independent projects whose work intersects with my fields of experience.

My collaborations may take the form of commissioned writing, book and editorial projects, lectures, seminars, workshops, research partnerships, institutional advice, or the development of public and educational programs.

Editors and publishers. I am available for commissioned essays, chronicles, columns, book projects, and specialist or public-facing writing on libraries, archives, cultural memory, knowledge systems, traditional musical instruments, sound, ecology, and Latin American territories.

Universities and conferences. I offer lectures, seminars, workshops, keynote presentations, teaching collaborations, and visiting-research activities. Programs can be adapted to academic, professional, or general audiences and delivered in Spanish or English.

Communities and grassroots organizations. I collaborate on projects involving local memory, oral histories, community archives, knowledge organization, cultural documentation, language and heritage work, and the design of tools or practices that communities can govern, adapt, and sustain on their own terms.

Libraries, archives, and museums. I collaborate on projects involving knowledge organization, classification, metadata, documentary systems, oral and community archives, critical institutional practice, and the representation of complex or marginalized forms of knowledge.

Research and cultural collaborations. I am interested in interdisciplinary work involving memory, territory, ecology, musical instruments, archives, material culture, documentary practices, and knowledge produced across Latin America.

Semantic and knowledge-infrastructure projects. Consulting, diagnosis, semantic design, metadata systems, ontologies, and documentary architectures are developed through Tela de Araña.

Music and musical instruments. Lectures, workshops, exhibitions, research partnerships, and public programs related to organology, traditional instruments, sound archives, and musical-instrument classification are developed through Instrumentarium.

Proposals do not need to fit a predetermined format. A conversation may begin with a clearly defined project, a difficult collection, an unresolved documentary problem, a possible article, or simply a question that requires several fields to speak to one another.

Contact and networks

You can reach me at edgardocivallero (@) gmail (.) com.

When writing about a possible collaboration, please include a brief description of the project or invitation, the institution or group involved, the proposed dates or timeframe, the preferred language, and any relevant format, audience, or practical requirements.

I am based in the Colombian Andes and can work in Spanish, English, French, Catalan, Galician, Italian, and Portuguese. Depending on the project, collaborations may take place online or in person.

I maintain an active presence on LinkedIn and Instagram, with a more limited presence on Facebook. Links are available in the website footer.

My academic publications and research profiles can also be found on Google Scholar and ResearchGate.

History

I began my online journey with Bitácora de un bibliotecario ("The Log of a Librarian"), launched on December 2, 2004, as one of the first Latin American and Spanish-language weblogs focused on libraries and librarianship. At the time, I had just finished my degree in Library and Information Science, with only a few years of work experience behind me, and I was stepping into an academic world still unknown to me. In those early posts, I reflected on my concerns and discoveries, my hopes and disappointments, my struggles and my connections. From 2005 to 2008, I maintained a parallel version in English under the same title. After 2009, my posting frequency slowed, and in 2014, I chose to close the original blog — bringing to an end a personal and professional chapter of my life.

With the distance of years and the lessons gathered along the way, I launched a new blog in 2015, simply titled Bibliotecario. It inherited the spirit of the earlier bitácora, continuing many of its themes, ideas, and values. That blog remained active until 2022. In parallel, I developed a series of more specialized blogs related to librarianship, including the first dedicated spaces on Indigenous libraries (Bibliotecas y pueblos originarios, Bibliotecas indígenas), orality (Tradición oral), and Indigenous languages (Palabra indígena).

At the same time, I explored topics related to ethnomusicology, traditional soundscapes, and musical instruments through projects like Bitácora de un músico, Un Sur de sonidos, Sounds of Abya Yala, Vientos de tierra de vientos (a self-produced album of Andean music), and Sonidos y silencios. This area of work was also reflected in parallel initiatives such as the digital magazine Tierra de vientos (focused on Andean music and culture) and the Aula abierta de música tradicional.

As a writer, I maintained a space titled Bitácora de un escritor, as well as dedicated blogs for each of my literary works, including Crónicas de la Serpiente Emplumada, Espíritus del viento, and El Ekeko.

Managing such a wide array of spaces eventually became unsustainable. Over time, I gradually consolidated everything into this site, where each piece is presented within a plural context — allowing the different projects to intersect and dialogue with one another.