Colombian Village Construction
rewilding & redefining domesticity in the jungle
June 2018 - Antioquia, Colombia
The project started in Antioquia, Colombia and it involved inhabiting an area of the jungle for a period of one month, while setting out to redefine traditional domesticity & rewild an area destroyed by wildfires. The workshop theme was “survival”, the first of many initiatives to build a village for humans to dwell in symbiosis with nature.Dwelling in the wild involved mapping the land, building temporary structures like tents, dressing areas, toilets and a gathering kitchen space. The main intention was to build a structure for a kitchen & dining space, as a center point for the village to come.
The structure was erected using bamboo building techniques. The material was locally sourced, cut, processed and assembled within the camp area. The building of the kitchen structured involved 250 bamboo poles split into halves, each 6m long. The bamboo has been delivered from Southeren Colombia where it was previously treated with Borax, as a protection method against erosion by insects. The preparation of the intersecting beams involved chiselling nodes from the split lengths of bamboo to increase flexibility of the element, followed by sanding. Each beam was composed on 4 layers of splits. The layers of bamboo were stacked and clamped tightly with rope clamps made on site. Water collected from the water stream was poured over the length to soften the material and allow bending.
Fique rope was tied around the splits and bamboo dowels were wedged through the beam at regular intervals (approx 30 cm). The rope hold st the layers together, while the dowels prevent the slipping of the layers.Construction in the jungle environment has been a unique challenge that opened up new horizon in terms of defining the domestic, as well as rethinking dwelling rituals & habits to consider the ecosystems around us and design accordingly.
A collaborative effort to rewild a destroyed jungle patch while redefining possibilities of living. Together with Dwelling in Symbiosis.
