Profile

About the site

This site, active sice 2022, is the public interface of my work — a layered archive, a strategic showcase, and a fog-drenched workshop.

It gathers the many threads I've been weaving since 2000 across librarianship, semantic consultancy, archival practice, biblio-naturalism, memory studies, sound research, artistic creation, critical writing, and epistemic dissent. What began within Library & Information Sciences has since become a broader, wilder ecosystem: one that is at once professional and personal, intellectual and affective, structured and feral.

My intention is to design and defend alternative infrastructures of memory and meaning — rooted in ecological awareness, neurodivergent cognition, sonic presence, and epistemic dissent — through archival, semantic, and artistic practices that challenge the dominant architectures of knowledge.

This is cognitive resistance. Andean-punk. Mist-soaked epistemology. Silence as memory. Sound as witness. Constructive grief. Memory as tactic. Process as revolt.

Here, metadata argues with puppets. Instruments sound absence. Archives rot on purpose. And memory is treated not as storage — but as a living, territorial, plural form of survival.

I invite you to explore my publications, navigate the landscapes I’ve been shaping, and connect around new ways of imagining, managing, preserving, and narrating knowledge, culture, and experience.

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, persistance, 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; Marginalia, an experimental digital journal; Wayrachaki Editora and El Zorro de Abajo, two independent imprints dedicated to critical knowledge and cultural memory; and Estudio paramuno, a creative and epistemic atelier rooted in the high-Andean forest, where I draw, write, build instruments, craft puppets, and give shape to low-tech narratives born of silence, fog, and resistance.

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.

Contact and networks

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

I've reduced my digital presence to focus on platforms that matter to me. I'm active on LinkedIn and Instagram, while I maintain only a minimal presence on Facebook. You'll find links in the website footer.

You can also find me on Google Scholar and ResearchGate.

History

I began my online journey with Bitácora de un bibliotecario ("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.