From Thought to Creation

Authors: Susana Chicunque Agreda, Alexandra Cuarán Jamioy, Eliana Sanchez-Aldana, Andrea Botero
Year: 2023
Location: Valle del Sibundoy, Putumayo, Colombia

Bejay: to wrap with water.

Centered on the practice of making the tšombiach—a traditional woven sash of the Kamëntŝa people—we, two Kamëntŝa women and two white mestiza women, reflect collectively on the presence of water and the problems surrounding it. According to Kamëntŝa cosmology, uaben bejay (water) is our sister. Water is blind and needs human help to care for its journeys—yet we sometimes forget this, as has happened in Kamëntŝa territory, where growing floods in the valley have been caused by human intervention.

We also reflect more broadly on the logics of the tšombiach—logics in which wrapping is conceived as a practice of care. This piece is neither a garment nor a tšombiach. It was created to think and feel with—to engage the body of the wearer, allowing them to connect with and become entangled in stories of water. The piece is displayed on a rack that invites visitors to try it on.

Broadly speaking, the story follows five ways of being of water: Water-Earth, water as the owner of the land; Water-Water, a living being; Water-Air, flowing freely through the valley until we begin to control it; Water-Fire, when it becomes angry and demands back what has been taken; Water-Void, when it quiets and becomes a calm spirit; Water-Sister, asking us to take her hand and walk with her through the paths and mountains of the territory.

Authors: Claudio Rossi, Daniela Atencio
Year: 2023
Location: Bogotá, Colombia

DESERT_Z: Robotic Circumstances is a circumstantial materialization of the La Guajira desert, approached from two perspectives. The first involves the translation of temporal and spatial processes, expressed through a robotic arm. Time—manifested through movement and the transformation of pieces during the (chronological) exhibition—becomes a sequence of precise, performative changes and effects. As the robot edited the material using heat, it activated a dual reading: the heat of the desert, its people, and its culture, but also heat as a global climatic phenomenon—inevitable and relentless—revealing a hidden landscape shaped over time. The second perspective engages spatial and embodied translation through the robot's movement, evoking the Yonna Wayuú.

Within its operational space, the robot generates a surrounding temporal context, where material objects—functioning as "interpreters" or vertical witnesses—are gradually transformed by their own material logic. The robotic choreography was programmed to edit twelve of these witnesses. Each thirty-minute session represented a compressed unit of time, carefully calibrated through material behavior. If one second equals a day (and night), then each thirty-minute session—1,800 seconds—accumulates thirty hypothetical years. Across six programmed sessions at the Pavilion event, the total span reaches 180 imagined years. DESERT_Z thus offered a programmed interpretation of the past, a turbulent present, and a projected future (year 2050). It was an exploratory exercise in robotic engagement with landscapes and materials in Latin America.

Authors: Studio Hifa
Year: 2023
Location: Bogotá, Colombia

Fungi—complex and enigmatic organisms—are so ubiquitous that they inhabit even the air we breathe. As life-based technologies, they can be transformed and allow us to explore new landscapes. With their unique logic, they challenge classical geometries and invite us to rethink how we design. Their potential to create interfaces that connect matter, daily life, and the digital world through biocomputation opens up a universe of multiple realities and possibilities.

Programming mycelium enables us to engage with the aesthetics of complexity and materiality, and discover more sustainable approaches to construction. In a world where the building industry is among the most polluting, mycelium presents an opportunity to reduce environmental impact. This organism has the potential to be more environmentally respectful and to exert less pressure on the climate. As a material, it invites us to explore new forms of creation. Its ability to grow using organic waste as a nutrient source reveals that valuable, durable materials can emerge from everyday leftovers. With its porous, insulating structure, mycelium opens up possibilities for thermal and acoustic protection in construction.

In this universe of multiple realities and possibilities, fungi allow us to imagine a more sustainable and harmonious future with nature. By exploring their logic and their ability to transform the ordinary into the extraordinary, we are encouraged to rethink our relationship with the natural world—and to build a future that is more conscious and respectful of the planet we inhabit.

Architects: Fundación Promedio
Year: 2020 — 2022
Location: La Calera, Colombia

In response to the conditions of an uneven plot bordered by a runoff and a stream, the buildable area for the house was naturally defined by tree-free zones. The design challenge for architect Samuel Córdoba Olier was to let these three alder-free clearings guide the layout and, in order to minimize disturbance to the living groundcover (as if it were a floodplain in Tumaco), to elevate the structure on stilts. Consisting of two residential wings for bedrooms and a central one for the kitchen, laundry area with access to the garden, dining room, living room, and bathroom—connected by covered walkways—the Palafito Montañero or Mountain Stilt House is anchored on concrete foundations and constructed with a reclaimed wood frame. Soil excavated from the site was reused for wall infill and finishes, as well as for shaping the stepped corridors that form the house's pedestrian access.

Earth is present throughout the interior, both in its texture and in the palette of earthen tones that turn creamy when mixed with lime, helping regulate humidity and temperature. The design of lamps, floors, and architectural details became a space for ephemeral experimentation by Catalina López B., who set out to work with the house's sloped walls using repurposed materials. The manual, slow process of bioconstruction—guided by natural rhythms and the evolving lives and work of its inhabitants—has become a daily practice of care and transformation. It has allowed them to recognize the land's unique features, the richness of the soil, and the animal and plant species of the surrounding Andean forest. It has also enabled them to enjoy the space together and to share their learning, successes, and rethinking in an organic, open school: a living and inspiring laboratory for the continuous exchange of lives, crafts, and knowledge, open to creatives from around the world and their experiments.

Authors: Espacio Crudo
Team: Andrés Felipe Caicedo, Paola Andrea Sánchez, Natalia Londoño
Year: 2021
Location: Bogotá, Colombia

Balanced Diet is a visual negotiation between the hidden qualities of function and form in food. When we think about food, we usually associate it directly with its primary function: nourishment. Much of our lives is spent considering its functional characteristics, since we're taught that to live a healthy life—with a strong body and sound mind—we must carefully balance what we give our bodies. In short, we must follow a balanced diet.

A focus on functionality was one of the defining features of postwar architectural movements that influenced the reconstruction of certain cities. Rebuilding became a priority for countries, despite the economic hardships they faced at the time. Brutalism rose to prominence in the 1950's, a period when scarcity and tight budgets placed greater emphasis on function over form. This style laid bare the materiality of construction: geometrically and modularly organized, these structures were solid both physically and visually. Inspired by the distinctive forms of this movement, we created six blocks using food as a construction material, focusing on its physical qualities rather than its nutritive value—treating it as a material whose physical properties would shape its final form.

Classifying something as edible is part of each society's collective agreements. As a result, many of the dishes we eat reflect these cultural pacts—they link us to a community and, more intimately, to a sense of home. This reveals that while a recipe may be meant to nourish, simply eating it makes us belong. Each solid structure is made with comfort food ingredients, or recetas caseritas—as we call them—so that the result becomes a visual negotiation between the hidden meanings of food, its form, and its function.

Architect: Alejandro Haiek Coll
Year: 2019
Location: Umbría, Italia

During his Fellowship at Civitella¹, Alejandro researched the context and environment of the castles, considering how nature and industry work in tandem to shape the traditional Umbrian landscape. His own process, which he refers to as 'fast assemblage/slow architecture' often begins by engaging with local laborers, builders, and fabricators to create a cartography of talents and resources—leading to hybrid practices and processes of abstract thinking. The "Industry of Nature" unfolds within the landscape through a matrix of art, design, engineering, and local social relations. The project does not materialize as an art object, but instead documents a dynamic exchange of narratives and shared resources. Using lines, dots, strips, and surfaces, the site's topography is transformed, leaving functional traces and seductive patterns that mirror nature's own invisible geometries.

Haiek's process-based artwork challenges our understanding of the natural world. What is nature? When and how does nature become artifice? When does artifice appear as 'natural'? The artwork seeks to reveal how 'Nature' is a relatively artificial construction within a postindustrial landscape, and how procedures, protocols, instruments, and tools introduced by industrialization slowly evolve into tradition and cultural knowledge.

The artwork unfolds in four acts or states of research: The first act Engaging Traditions focuses on social cartography, documenting parallel histories, memories of the site, and testimonies of the landscape. The second act Landscapes Choreographies treats the landscape as a canvas, tracing the territory and organizing its elements into logical geometries. The performative action transforms the site into an active topography. The final act Tectonic Performance configures a new territory using elements of everyday life. Materials act as recursive devices, hybridizing the industry's basic inventory with the living matter of the place.

1 This project is the result of the 2019 WOJR/Civitella Ranieri Architecture Prize, awarded by the Civitella Ranieri Foundation.

Architect: Paulo Tavares
Collaborators: Bö'u Xavante Asociation
Year: 2013 – ongoing
Location: Marãiwatsédé, Mato Grosso, Brazil

From the early 1950s to the late 1960s, the A'uwe - Xavante people, an indigenous nation of central Brazil, was subjected to a brutal campaign of land dispossession and forced removals to open space for cattle farms and soy plantations. Officially known as "pacification," this campaign was part of an overall strategy of territorial colonization that the Brazilian military described as "occupying demographic voids."

In collaboration with the Bö'u Xavante Association of Marãiwatsédé, we mapped the ancient villages from which they have been forcibly displaced. All the sites identified display a remarkable similar feature in that a patch of vegetation grew over the arc-shaped footprint of the ancient village. Made of a combination between medium and large trees, palms and other types of plants and vines, these botanic formations contain species that are associated with Xavante traditional occupation and land managing systems.

In many different ways, these botanic formations are the product of the village design, being the equivalent to an architectural ruin, albeit not dead but living. Can we claim trees, vines and palms to be historic monuments? Is the forest an "urban heritage" of non-western forms of design?

The collective memory of the Xavante people remains alive in the living fabric of the forest. But most of this archaeological heritage is situated within private fenced lands to which they do not have access. As such, they are in danger of being destroyed by the advancement of the agribusiness frontier.

Here we present a draft petition to be submitted to IPHAN (Brazilian National Institute of Artistic and Historic Heritage) and UNESCO calling for those patches of trees that bear witness to the ancient Xavante settlements to be considered and protected as architectural heritage. This petition contains a set of protocols, visual files, mappings, and field notes that identify these botanic formations as archaeological sites, probing the relations between natural and cultural landscapes as they are defined by categorizations that shape colonial-modern collections, archives and museums –– of natural and architectural history alike.

Author: Leonel Castañeda Galeano
Year: 2015
Location: Center for Memory, Peace, and Reconciliation, Bogotá, Colombia

The black box is a device—used primarily in aircraft, though also found in cars and trains—designed to record navigation data that can later help determine the causes of an accident. It consolidates information and presents it on a single plane. The accident—an unforeseen event that arises beyond any calculation—demands a return to that data, a rereading that allows for recalculating possibilities and preventing any detected failure from recurring.

In 2025, Colombia commemorates forty years since the Armero tragedy, a natural disaster triggered by the eruption of the Nevado del Ruiz volcano, which caught nearby towns by surprise and resulted in the deaths of approximately twenty-three thousand people. Although multiple volcanological agencies had warned the government about the volcano's unusual activity two months prior, there was no adequate response. The state's failure to act—both at the time of the disaster and in dealing with its aftermath—became painfully evident. The episode left a lasting mark on the country's history and became a symbol of grief, abandonment, and institutional ineffectiveness.

The Caja Negra, Armero project does not seek to black-box—that is, to seal memory into black boxes—but rather to reclaim a memory of bodies and restore their relevance. It proposes an articulation between container and content that functions both as a theater of cruelty and as a memory device embedded in images; a reflection and reinterpretation of the national context through the lens of vulnerability.

Developed from a series of collages placed inside a container, Caja Negra, Armero was first exhibited at the Center for Memory, Peace, and Reconciliation between November and December 2015 to mark the thirtieth anniversary of the tragedy, and later at Galería Espacio El Dorado during the first half of 2016.

Authors: Alexander Gümbel, Daniel H. Nadal, and Santiago Caicedo de Roux
Year: 2023
Location: Bogotá, Colombia

Concierto Visual del Medio Día or Noon Visual Concert was conceived as the result of a spontaneous and fortunate encounter among three creators of audiovisual works. Designed as a pause in the hectic schedule of a conference, the space offered a moment and place for quiet conversation while a series of projections unfolded, each addressing diverse themes linked—through different lenses—to emerging media and modes of knowledge production.

This visual spread included a series of deconstructivist short films—directed by Santiago Caicedo—featuring structures and space as protagonists; four encounters between a cappella vocal music (performed by the ensemble 12 para las 8) and architecture around the notion of the "sacred," directed by Alexander Gümbel; and the documentary Los Colores del Níspero, directed by Daniel H. Nadal, which presents a cross-cutting interpretation of social research to uncover the subtle relationships between the tangible and intangible values of the Afro-descendant community Ma-Ma-jarí.

What tied the three works together was the transversal nature of the audiovisual medium, their investigative approaches, and a shared intention to reach audiences beyond the bounds of traditional academia—fostering dialogue and reflection on space and how we relate to it.