Network Projects / Common Ground / Ecotone: Chagras, Payaos, Camellones / Jardín Maloka

Jardín Maloka

Jardín Maloka is a pedagogical-architectural site designed by Pedro Aparicio and his architecture studio APLO artist Nicolás Paris, curator Juliana Steiner, in collaboration with Francy Méndez, Arlex Tovar, Rudy Villegas, teachers and students from the Custodio Garcia Rovira School, local sabedor Melvino Yavinape from the Coco Viejo community, with support of the Morocoto community of Caranacoa Yurí and the national navy of Colombia.

Jardín Maloka is a medicinal agroecological orchard-classroom which posits itself as a space for radical learning. Through and within it, nature, more-than-human species and humans interact and learn from each other in the spirit of mutual unity and cooperation using strategies of nature such as balance, symmetry, and impermanence. As a space for exchange, new models of learning are built among students, teachers, and their immediate environment, based on poetic economy, symbolic exchange and plural anatomy, with an aim to shift the structures of learning and how knowledge/power asserts itself within a classroom setting.

The jardín also serves as a medicinal plant garden allowing it to support indigenous knowledge of local flora as food and as nourishment in Colombia’s northern Amazonia, located in the Estrella Fluvial de Inirida in Guainia, a three-river confluence that flows into the Orinoco river. The jardín also houses the educational program Educación Propia that reclaims knowledge from different indigenous communities from the area including the Kurripaco, Puinave, Piapoco, Tucano and Cubeo communities, and acts as a form of resistance to a homogenous model of learning.

As an architectural site, it is inspired by the shabono structure (traditional dwelling from the Venezuelan/Brazilian Yanomami community of the Orinoco.) Materials were locally sourced from the Morocoto community, creating a low impact structure which used natural resources from the area. The technique of the chiqui-chiqui palm (also from the Morocoto community) was employed in the roof, creating an exchange of local knowledge for this construction.

Jardín Maloka is located at the Cuabanare Farm at the Custodio Garcia Rovira School in Inirida, Guainia. The pedagogical program of the Jardín Maloka also takes place in other sites, working with the Coco Viejo and La Ceiba indigenous communities, and in the Kenke Cultural and Natural Park.

Curated by

Juliana Steiner

Location

Inirida, Guainia

Resources

Other Media

Biographies

Pedro Aparicio-Llorente
Pedro Aparicio-Llorente is a Colombian architect who designs and researches buildings and landscapes through multispecies technologies. He is Principal at APLO Architecture & Landscape. He is adjunct faculty from the School of Architecture at the Universidad de los Andes in Bogotá, Colombia. He holds a Master in Design Studies – Urbanism, Landscape, Ecologies from Harvard University. He is currently an Andrew W. Mellon researcher for the interdisciplinary project The Digital Now: Architecture and Intersectionality at the Canadian Centre for Architecture.
APLO
APLO is an architecture office founded by Pedro Aparico Llorente, where Daniel Blanco, Angel A Angel and Luis Gonzales currently work. Projects oscillate between territorial infrastructure and urban design; residential, educational and community buildings; design of objects, events and exhibitions; and pedagogical processes. Their work moves through applied research in mixed media in order to assume each project as specific and simultaneous operations. This methodology leads the studio to compose ideas within the intersection between construction techniques and material ecologies. The decisions behind a project seek to find form and materiality through critical, aesthetic and practical narratives. Thus, each project is a step in the navigation of their own imaginaries and activities, while at the same time corresponding to particular circumstances of the collective action of being and doing in the world.
Nicolás Paris
Nicolás Paris is an artist whose work is closely linked to questions about collective learning. His work method, based mainly on dialogue, incomplete architecture, and the act of drawing and cultivating, seeks to build environments for exchange, the production of reflections, and finding new ways of being together. Since the beginning of 2017, he founded the Institute for Radical Learning (InPAR): a place to mobilize collaborative processes and facilitate the activation of study groups. He has projects for: XII Biennial of Havana; I Chicago Architecture Biennale; XXX São Paulo Biennale; IX Shanghai Biennale; II Triennial of New Museum; XI Biennial of Lyon; LIV Venice Biennale and VII Mercosur Biennial. His work is part of the following collections: MUSAC, Leon; JUMEX Collection, Mexico City; Kadist Art Foundation, San Francisco / Paris; MoMA, New York; Tate Collection, London; La Caixa, Barcelona; Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary (TBA21), Vienna; Banco de la República Museum, Bogotá; among others.