How can we work together along with nature? In what way local knowledge is a meeting point for an interdisciplinary “buen vivir” design process?

“The birth of collaboration” is based on “water harvesting” as a design system in sustainable co-production and/or co-creation between the ecosystem and the individual. Water harvesting is an agrarian practice based on the communal work practice of the “ayllu” that has survived since pre-Columbian times.

The Bartolomé Aripaylla Association (ABA) is the driving force behind “water harvesting”. The association was founded in 1991 in the rural community of Quispillacta, district of Chuschi, located at 3,148 m above sea level in the department of Ayacucho. Peru. Chuschi was also one of the most affected districts during the internal armed conflict in Peru.

At present there are 71 lakes that are used for the benefit of agriculture and livestock in the different “ayllus”. By planting specific types of local plants, the community have supplied water to different communities. One of them is known as “Puttaca”, also known as the “water caller”. Its use allows the nesting of large quantities of water from the higher areas of the valley to the lower and urban areas, encouraging the formation of wetland found in the Andes knows as “bofedales” for the supply of water for livestock and crops.

Under this logic, the operation of the plant translates into a system of organic engineering for water transmission where its fabric functions as an aquifer conduit and its traditional use in the community denotes a primordial place within its social development in favour of the idea of “buen vivir”.

The installation portraits, in an abstract way, the “water harvest”, which is the relationship between the “puttaca” plant, originated in the and the water, under the system of communitary work .  The video is an essay on the territory and the process of such water journey under traditional technology and communal practice that is practised to this day in Quispillacta, which is one of the many communities in Latin America where “water harvesting” is still being practised.