The author

I'm a librarian, an archival researcher, and a trained musician who treats instruments as documents and sound as a form of knowledge transmission and semantic architecture. My work cuts across memory systems — libraries, archives, museums, and landscapes — to trace how musical instruments and sonic artifacts encode, carry, and sometimes erase histories.

I studied music formally and have recorded, performed, and built instruments for decades. But my practice is not about virtuosity — it's about epistemic excavation. I hold a degree in Librarianship and Documentation, a master's in Historical Archiving and Memory, a specialization in Southern Epistemologies, and an ongoing PhD in Knowledge Management. I also have academic backgrounds in biology and history. Before all that, I was a graphic designer, radio host, editor, writer, and visual artist — all of which still bleed into my musical work.

My main research platform is Instrumentarium. Here, instruments are approached as documentary objects: material artifacts that encode, preserve, and transmit information, and whose trajectories are shaped by cataloguing practices, archival silences, museum collection histories, and processes of loss and extinction. Instrumentarium includes articles, blogs, and podcasts, and also a series of digital books produced through my independent imprint El Zorro de Abajo Editora.

On the creative side, estudioparamuno channels this research into a living sound laboratory based in a small village in the Colombian high Andean forest. There, I work with ecosystems as active producers of sound, and with natural materials — from clay, bark, and sap to ash, bone, and hair — as structural and acoustic components for instrument-making. This is not metaphorical work: it is experimental lutherie grounded in ecological processes, material memory, and the epistemology of matter.

As a musician, I do not operate within conservatory-based performance circuits. Instead, my practice centers on the experimental reconstruction, demonstration, and analysis of instruments and their associated documents — journals, photographs, recordings — especially those housed in libraries, archives, and museum collections I also explore ecological and biological elements and processes as sound artifacts. My performances take the form of demonstrative sessions that weave sound, construction, and interpretation into a single storytelling-musical experience, making explicit both what can be known from documentary sources and what remains irretrievable.

This hybrid position allows me to work across libraries, archives, museums, universities, and cultural institutions, producing concerts, exhibitions, lectures, workshops, publications, recordings, and educational activities that treat music as a form of archival inquiry and sound as a mode of knowledge production rather than as a purely virtuosic end.

If you'd like to explore other facets of my work — in libraries, archives, memory, biodiversity, and language — you can visit my main site: edgardocivallero.com.

Contact and networks

You can reach me by email at edgardocivallero (@) gmail (.) com.

I've reduced my digital presence to focus on platforms that matter to me. I'm active on LinkedIn and Instagram, while I maintain only a minimal presence on Facebook. You'll find links in the website footer.

You can also find me on Google Scholar and ResearchGate.