Fulbright 2024 Blog
Research for the creative project entitled “Cañ and Ara: Mending Climates with Vernacular Cosmovisions“ received a Fulbright scholarship for the 2024-2025 year. Follow the journey below:
BRIEF
A cataclysm sets the myth in motion, two sons of Cañ surviving a diluvial flood that drowned out all life of the Cañari cosmovision. From the far reaches of the Ecuadorian Amazon jungle untouched by Pachamama’s rage - two macaw women flew over the Andes to bring to the brothers the knowledge of cultivation. A civilization was born. Watching the flood waters of today, the sea level rise and the shifting microclimates, it’s not hard to ponder how the knowledge of the Earth might usher in an era beyond anthropocentric change. Adaptations from communities refined over generations bear modern and innovative fruits for those willing to revitalize the technology. Cultural exchange has always been an important cornerstone of Ecuadorian cultures, routes like the Qhapaq Ñan, the Inca road extending more than 30,000 km across the continent, once bridged the now fragmented climates of pre-columbian Abya Yala. Ecuador is a multi-ethnic state, with a plurality of cultures composing diverse architectural typologies. How has architectural exchange and the insights of ancestral knowledge from within indigenous communities transformed into sustainable buildings that mitigate climate disaster?
BRIEF
A cataclysm sets the myth in motion, two sons of Cañ surviving a diluvial flood that drowned out all life of the Cañari cosmovision. From the far reaches of the Ecuadorian Amazon jungle untouched by Pachamama’s rage - two macaw women flew over the Andes to bring to the brothers the knowledge of cultivation. A civilization was born. Watching the flood waters of today, the sea level rise and the shifting microclimates, it’s not hard to ponder how the knowledge of the Earth might usher in an era beyond anthropocentric change. Adaptations from communities refined over generations bear modern and innovative fruits for those willing to revitalize the technology. Cultural exchange has always been an important cornerstone of Ecuadorian cultures, routes like the Qhapaq Ñan, the Inca road extending more than 30,000 km across the continent, once bridged the now fragmented climates of pre-columbian Abya Yala. Ecuador is a multi-ethnic state, with a plurality of cultures composing diverse architectural typologies. How has architectural exchange and the insights of ancestral knowledge from within indigenous communities transformed into sustainable buildings that mitigate climate disaster?
9.22.2024 ALABADO
Tucked away behind an unassuming courtyard barely alive with the rust of coffee and delicate lunch-goers, an entryway subsumed by the color gold beckons. The centro histórico, UNESCOs first Cultural Heritage of Humanity designation, now emptied by a mass exodus towards the north - still maintains that vibrant electricity I’ve come to rely on. The bountiful geometry of chakanas intermingle with the sometimes melancholic folclórica. A synonymous time for celebration and for introspection. It’s a unique mission, to decontextualize cultural artifacts from across Ecuador as a means of telling a different sort of story - one of interstices and exchange, instead of a narrative of separation. I’ve always been struck by how genuinely culturally diverse the landscapes of such a geographically small political-organization could be, and how seamlessly many of these arts and customs intertwine - or clash. A more expansive definition for ‘lineage.’ Here, at Alabado, identity as ’ecuadorian’ is taken literally - unifying otherwise distal cultures, strung somewhere between antiquity and now.
In the likeness of the Apus, tiny gods of stone mimic their mountainous counterparts, the original spirits of the Andes. Were you to ask a local ‘what composes Ecuador?’ likely you would hear a soliloquy resembling a jigsaw puzzle of the countries three distinct geographic regions: the pacific coast, the Andean highlands, and the Amazonian basin. Stratifying the country horizontally, these distinct typologies have cultivated a plethora of unique climatic conditions which have in turn supported severe variation between material access and craft production. As a vernacular researcher very much embedded in a deeper understanding of how microclimate impacts culture, the association in this country is second nature. Unfortunately, I find this relationship to be incredibly difficult to describe to people from most other countries who can’t imagine nature as a form of identity. So many societies have divorced themselves from landscape, and therefore separated the inherent knowledge of place from practice. I have only traveled to a handful of countries, but of that small sampling, Ecuador stands out as a dwindling stronghold for the voice of Pachamama.
In reality, cultural practices worldwide developed in close proximity to the microclimates in which these cultures lived. That is to say - that adaptation to nature is synonymous with cultural identity. Peoples indigenous to landscape learned carefully from the plants and creatures that are endemic to place, in order to facilitate a system that is not simply survival, but thriving society. Before a common language, ceramics and molding spoke a deep knowledge of landscape, technologically complex aggregates that speak a language of the earth. Civilization was built from skilled hands with inherent understanding of viscosity, integrity, and chemical balance over a half millennium.
Images are messages, and amidst the countries clashing geographies, an intercultural dialogue through art falls neatly into view. For example, labyrinthine seals traditional of coastal communities have been discovered in the Napo culture’s Amazon region in funerary urns, offering glimpses into pre-columbian trade, ritual, death, and dreams. To be here, to bear witness historical time is the underappreciated role of the observer unintentionally conversing between today and antiquity. Artifacts tell a cultural biography of a given community. We understand a place by the remnants of what has been left behind; transmitters and codes.
The power of the icon will always permeate our imagination. Between our modern understanding of anthropology, archeology and architecture, when viewing into the past there will always be loss, incompleteness. It's the symbolic constellation of meaning which imparts a sense of humanness that permeates our horizons, giving us the opportunity to draw lines through which pictures emerge.
The old casita retrofitted by an emergent subway station is quiet yet full with the distinct scent of palo santo incense burning. An aroma that replaces the increasingly migrating population. I remember these streets once lively with music and dancing, now the ghost of institutionalized violence haunts the capital; empty tiendas waiting to be filled in. Even tourists visiting in smaller and smaller numbers - I could guess it was a result of the news coverage in other countries that project a ubiquitous sense of lawlessness. But in these tender spores I find some remorse, some cultural resilience withstanding that remains dormant through conflict awaiting sunlight and a delicate resurgence.
9.16.2024 VORTEX
‘The rivers are crying’ and the evidence was undisputed, as the trans-continental water flees to the far off Atlantic. Welcomed back to the red city of Quito by the falling ash of the invasive Eucalyptus trees from forgotten plantations, I was reminded of snow in an eternal spring. Orange over Pichincha glows at night; valley as firebelt.
I immediately recognized the smell of fallen bodies, even before my partner, who just assumed that burning trash was the source of the air quality alert. It’s a scent burned into my deepest memories, and as if an oracle in the sky, the setting sun glowed red of prophecy. It’s not a knowledge I’m proud of, but the experience of losing a community beneath fire is the sort of thing that sticks with you always. Who knew that here, halfway across the world on a whole new hemisphere that I would find similar visions of destruction, this time beneath the Páramo.
Severity of destruction looms large in the land where Ecuadorians “sleep peacefully amid smoking volcanoes.” I imagine life inside the cities inside of craters, burrows in lava tubes one day awaiting excavation.
“Is this normal?”
I proceed inquisitively yet hesitantly. It’s the driest season I’ve seen yet, was the sentiment I heard over and over, that fire season arrived in Ecuador only in recent memory. With the disappearance of El Niño, the lifeblood of the rainforest has little left to give. I remember these canyons, these grassy sponges so abundant in water that they spilled over in random and frequent falls. Dangerously so, the memories of old highways have been washed away. Subsisting on volcanic ash, bearing witness; A valley of Polylepis, paper trees, evolves into a tinder box.
Following the traces of empty waterways with grounded canoes, the familiar outline of the village in the palm oil plantations emerges. This is my fourth visit on the Aguarico, yet no one had ever described to me the meaning of a remolino - a vortex that at high tide sways and pulls violently in opposing directions. It seemed like an obvious metaphor for the valiant split between the community and their cousins who sold their land for oily food vouchers. It’s always been a territory constructed by waterways, a venice deep in the heart of Abya Yala, an endless archipelago. In fact, I sometimes describe the rainforest like one massive floodplain, a mangrove of sorts inhibited by atmosphere. Terrestrial life underwater is no simple feat, and those adaptations of a millennia are now increasingly hypoxic.
Overshadowing the visits of various NGOs, a mildly performative convention of sorts as proof-of-concept of indigenous investment, the women entrepreneurs have the few hard conversations that most modernizing communities define as taboo. Beneath the arms of the ceibo I see dichotomies; Lethargic barbecues and Instagram, birthdays and exams in far away Quito, sovereignty and technologization, Toyota and alien freshwater tilapia, Starlink and dying achiote. These conglomerates, they say, they’re extracting in the same way that the oil privateers are. Environmental progress, but with little interest in the dying arts of an already bifurcated nation.
“Where is the biodiversity?”
I ask with a tinge of disappointment, my juicy legs unbitten by insects that might otherwise be hungry. The absent sounds of robots embodied by perching birds of prey coo a deafening silence. It’s the dry season, they reassure me. But also, the dryest they’ve ever seen. Climate change has always been an abstract concept in the volatile land of abundance, but for the first time, the conversations have context. And well, the imagined days of our childhood have finally arrived, yet no one knows what to do. It’s not some grandiose moment of apocalypse, instead climate disaster is like an heirloom; a slow descent into disrepair.