CASA ENSAMBLE CHACARRÁ
The Colombian architecture office Ruta 4, together with Club Activo 20-30, La Morena TV, Scouts and Litro de Luz have share with us ¨Casa Ensamble chacarrá ¨ project located in Pereira, Colombia. With emphasis in use of local materials an community construction, the project seeks to be ¨a place for diversity and culture¨ in a neighborhood where hundreds of families have had to come Displaced by the internal conflict of the country.
As a testimony to tropical forest of Santa Cecilia or Chocó woman´s singing, between the ¨Zinc and esterilla¨ colored in white, black and brown, turn, live, die and love the cultural Kaleidoscope called ¨Plumón Alto¨ that well might be called Colombia, that well might be called earth. Isaac Newton said that between more away is the light of his origin, greater will be the dispersion of each of their particles, and eventually the light is will return imperceptible. In the journey of their lands to ¨El Plumón¨ they left behind everything they had, the pacific and Caribbean coast, the palaphitic architecture of Chocó or the mountains of Antioquia , the lands they work and live on, their home, Perhaps because in their effort to flee the violence they didn´t have much time or simply it did not looked necessary. What they couldn´t leave, what was indissoluble on their blood and skin was the ¨bunde¨ and ¨marimba¨ the fish and ¨patacón¨, the ¨Trovas ¨, is a piece of light that still is projected across their memory, they have been man and woman from land and sea, fishers and farmers, they were religious or maybe not, but now they`re big worlds trying to coexist in a very small world who takes charge making them feel strangers. Although the route for doing architecture begins with other questions, ours initiates here, with the discovery and the recognition of the cultures and the territory.
We know, and we know it simply having felt it. The sons of miscegenation between latinamerican people, Africans and native have a pact, a bond or rather a relationship with music and love, with corporeality and spirituality. We know that freedom is reduced to the capacity to be able to accede to the purest manifestations of the human spirit, so why give fractals to ones who breathe music? Or why talk when we could play soccer? In a harassing world with every single difference we wanted to build a space that existed thanks to that. ¨Casa ensamble Chacarrá¨is a place for diversity and culture, it gets is name from a chocoan palm, brought to the conversation for Gonzalo Andagueda, the community leader, who desperate use a beautiful speech like last resource for convince a group of children decided that the space was called ¨Bunde¨. Gonzalo or ¨Goma¨ as usually he was known in the neighborhood, he didn´t look active and anxious like usually he is, actually he have a inusual actitude of security and calm, would not last much:
¨kids, silence ! silence ! SILENCE !! listen, in Chocó in very swampy places there is a Palm, the chacarrá palm, but did you know what it needs to grow up? It needs the same that us … be next to other roots, Chacarrá don´t grow up alone, we neither. ¨
Chacarrá is a time machine or a lighthouse that unifies, that transforms us in silhouettes. Chacarrá is a gesture of repair, Or rather the revendication to a territory that some modern slaves hide under a rug, if this take us to Chocó or Santa Cecilia, Cienaga Grande or Apartadó, that doesn´t matter and actually that´s the point, that does´nt matter where we come from or where we´re going. Chacarrá is a symbol builds all by themselves and a symbol can be the voice of ones who does not have it, but a symbol constructed in group is a shout of resistance. To the place we couldn´t bring the thick foliage, neither the fauna from their lands, But in the absence of this we find the energy from the ¨sancocho¨ and ¨arroz arrecho¨According to them enough to start the construction, but it was not about creating a physical space, we wanted to reconstruct memory, to create symbols and to learn together, under Don Julio's insistent warning, a tireless community leader ¨I do what you say to me, but don´t say to me later that the piggy had babies and the babies got lost¨ So… Well … the babies got lost and when he find them, it was so easy as : ¨walk with me and have money¨ and that´s what we do, we walk together in a road of zinc sheets sharpened like machetes and hot like a frying pan, crushed guaduas, when you build shortage of funds, even the energy is given by the Neighbor. But in the shortage there is dignity and here we dignify it. And if the persons hate the unknown, we can visit it.
The project for the construction of ¨ Casa ensamble Chacarrᨠstart of the lack of artistic and pedagogic processes in the community of Plumón alto, in Pereira, a Neighborhood characterized by the violation of human rights, made by populations of different regions of the country who have been displaced by the armed conflict in Colombia. With support of several groups of the city and with the community workforce, it arises the ¨convite¨ like a civil action for the construction of a symbolic space and a scene for the education and the arts.
His composition is the testimony of local materials and technologies, using barrels of oil as spread footings, guadua triangles like structure, esterilla like the building skin and zinc sheets like roof. Between simple anchorages and systematic processes, it gets up supported by tripods, A triangle of shining light likememory of the power of the collectivity.
