{"id":1677,"date":"2021-12-23T15:18:23","date_gmt":"2021-12-23T15:18:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/viraltimes.climateactionchildhood.net\/?page_id=1677"},"modified":"2022-07-14T10:28:05","modified_gmt":"2022-07-14T10:28:05","slug":"challuabamba_eng","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/viraltimes.climateactionchildhood.net\/index.php\/gardens\/challuabamba_eng\/","title":{"rendered":"Challuabamba"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Educator: Roc\u00edo (Goti) Brito
Children: Isabella, Tomas, Amalia, Luciana & Elian<\/p>\n\n\n

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Situated where Cuenca\u2019s city valley ends and the highland mountains begin, Challuabamba is a meeting place of temporalities and existences. Here, Cuenca\u2019s expanding contemporary suburbia meets longstanding Andean farmlands. The Pan-American highway moves through Challuabamba, edging both ultra modern concrete housing developments and traditional adobe homes made of clay soil and grasses. Challuabamba is figured by the meetings of these contradictory, coexisting Andean realities.<\/h4>\n\n

In the garden, the children notice insects and creatures whose pathways gesture toward an \u2018underneath side\u2019 of Challuabamba. Speculating together about what exists below, we meet an already living world on the undersides of the garden. Storying this world alive through artistic languages such as drawing and painting, together with the children we create new ways of being in a place that is shaped by shadows and the unseen. As educators listen for particular stories over others, the garden\u2019s underneath world becomes a meeting place of complex heterogeneity, where peculiar creatures rely on the bodies of each other for survival.\u202f\u202f\u202f<\/h4><\/div>\n\n\n\n
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The underneath world<\/h1>\n\n\n

The Challuabamba garden is situated in a beautifully manicured landscape that surrounds a newly remodeled, contemporary hacienda on the outskirting mountains of Cuenca. The original home was once built with \u2018adobe\u2019, a traditional form of construction using a composition of clay soil and natural grasses, and has been recently updated with a modern concrete build.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Out in the yard with a small group of children, Eli\u00e1n flips over a large stone. In the damp soil beneath, small round bugs with tiny legs and a grey, armored shell are in abundance. The children call them \u2018roll ups\u2019. When roll ups are exposed from beneath the stones, they curl frantically into small balls. The children say rolls ups need to hide because they live in the shadows.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The roll ups are not the only creatures in the garden.  We also encounter a discarded plastic energy drink that is bustling with ants travelling in many directions, eventually flowing into a unified line that leads to a deep hole in the soil.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Tom\u00e1s tells us, \u201cthe bugs move easily downstairs because they are small and the ants go out to work, and then come back downstairs.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We are pulled into the children\u2019s proposition that \u201cliving things live underneath things.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

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We see the children\u2019s interest in the \u2018undersides\u2019 of things <\/h4>\n\n\n\n

as a possible figure that might help us to undo the \u2018upside\u2019 <\/h4>\n\n\n\n

of this beautiful yard that lies behind the modern house.<\/h4>\n<\/div><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
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The children\u2019s proposition to consider an already living world on the undersides of the modern garden opens us up to encounter the garden as a site of contradiction \u2013 a place that holds immense possibility for experiencing a radically different world.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

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Without creating a divide between upsides and undersides, we set out with questions to think with in our inquiry alongside the children:<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

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Who lives in underneath worlds?<\/em>
What is it like to live there?<\/em>
Does the underside rely on the upside in order to exist? What dependencies might be here?<\/em><\/h5>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
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We draw together below the trampoline as a way of working through emerging ideas that might story life in the underneath world. However, the light is a problem as the underneath world is \u2018only made of darkness and shadows.\u2019

We move our work inside, cover all the windows, and draw beneath dark, hanging fabrics and a single candlelight.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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For the children, the underneath world is a place with no sun, only small fires. Darkness, doubt, and distortion are the conditions of this place.

Interested in what the underneath world might open up, we  attune to the peculiar sensitivities that move beyond anything we already know. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

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As the children continue painting, the idea of \u2018the normal human\u2019 is undone. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

They notice a large handprint on the paper, a trace of what Luciana suggests is \u201cthe formless human who has no arms or legs.\u201d

In the underneath world, \u201chumans can only feel with their formless bodies; they do not have eyes.\u201d These prints on the earth are traces of humans finding their way around without vision. Eli\u00e1n asks, \u201cHow does the man build a fire without arms?\u201d<\/strong> <\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

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As we paint, intertwined conversations emerge. 

\u201cA big man appears to break the branches of the tree, but the branch grew again. He could not see anything and he kept tripping over everything, holding onto branches to avoid falling into the river.\u201d – Luciana

\u201cA butterfly lands in the underneath world … and when it tries to fly away it becomes a big wolf.\u201d – Tom\u00e1s

\u201cThe man began to collect stones so that he could light a fire and be able to eat at night. Because he did not see anything and was hungry, he collected many leaves from the trees and gathered them all together. He heard many sounds, the river, the butterfly, the bugs, but he did not know where to go.\u201d – Eli\u00e1n<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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With an attention to the dominant figure of the conquesting human who uses mind over matter to master uncertainty, we set out to stay with the troubles of the underneath world and its potential as a place of intense disturbance, distortion, and mutation in order to unsettle the conceptual categories we use to imagine ourselves and our bodies. We seek to stay in the possibilities of the underneath world, and to take seriously the children\u2019s speculations as invitations to think. We set out to make strange the space for other ways of living.<\/h6>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
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To intensify strange forms and mutations, we project the paintings on the wall and create stories from the shadows.

\u201cWhere I go my shadow always goes with me and I see many more things,\u201d Amalia says.

Noticing that Amalia\u2019s body is intersecting with and through other things, we think more about what it might be like to become a formless body in the underneath world. The possibility of shared bodies emerges.<\/h4>\n\n\n\n
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Shadows work at the sites of contrast, the meeting place of oppositions.<\/h4>\n\n\n\n

\u201cTo make shadows we need light and we will always find light in the dark.\u201d Tom\u00e1s<\/h4>\n\n\n\n
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Shadows help us to dissolve the human as the sole protagonist of the underneath world, and to refigure how we conceptualize a body. The shadows make visible correspondences between<\/em> things, inter-dependencies, flows, and formation as a shared movement. In the shadows one thing is always the \u2018between\u2019 of something else.<\/h4>\n\n\n
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With images of the interdependent bodies rendered through our shadow work, we return to Eli\u00e1n’s question about the formless human: \u201cHow does the man make a fire without arms?\u201d<\/strong><\/h3>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
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