Weaving together nature, art and architecture

It's not something that I even think about in terms of using it as part of my daily life or creative practice. Nature was always part of my life in Ecuador. Growing up in the Andes, you wake up and around you, you have volcanoes, mountains, it's right there, not even something to consider. I actually started thinking about it when I moved away to London. That's when I would say, oh my god, something is missing. What's happening with me? Why am I feeling this way? I realised it was because I needed to find my own forms of connecting with nature in a place where you have nature, but of course it's not the same. There are so many other types that I wasn't used to when I grew up. It wasn't only the weather, It was going from looking out of the window and seeing for kilometres, to seeing your neighbours only a few feet away.

It’s not as simple as saying, Ecuador is good for nature, London is bad. There’s no right or wrong, but I had a sense of freedom there and I feel it every time I go back. I can just keep walking, it's so easy. In London, at the beginning, I couldn't really figure out my way of getting to nature. Then I found Battersea Park. Of course there are much more interesting places, “proper” natural spaces in the UK, but I thought, no, that's the place I’m going to go, every single day, no matter what. And I just walk, you know, thinking about nature, thinking about architecture and this experience walking has been crucial for me as a research practice and also as a life practice.

That's something super positive that London has given me, this idea that I can walk anywhere. In Ecuador, every weekend, it's normal to go for a hike, from one mountain to another, so I was used to that idea of walking. But when I came here, I started using it like meditation rather than escape. So I just walk. I walk every single day. Because walking is experience, experiencing space, experiencing architecture in whatever form it is.

There's something that happens to me when I'm in London, that whenever I leave, whether it's to go to Sussex, like I did recently, or somewhere else, it takes me a few days to adapt. It's really weird, but I feel like here I’m in a constant rush. There’s so much, so many things that you have to do, so many things on that checklist, so many urban constraints, social constraints, architectural spatial constraints, that you don’t really take the time to observe. So, what happened to me when I went to the treehouse was that at first I didn't see anything. I couldn’t experience the space because I didn't know where to look, where to focus.

Being in that forest, in that landscape, for four days, there was a lot of time for introspection. Me with my own thoughts, no distractions. How many days a year do we live like that? How many days a year do you not have signal, not have your phone, your computer, and be you with your own body and understand the space around you because of the way you’re moving and seeing? You're always going really fast, then there's suddenly no need to rush.

I feel like losing those corporeal and mental constraints was something that struck me. It wasn’t instantly a good thing. It’s a process. The same thing happens when I go back to Ecuador. I want everything instantly because that’s how it is in London, I'm like, why are they not giving me coffee in two minutes?! And then I fall into that pace and it’s much better, for myself, for my peace of mind, for my creativity. Basically, you start building this new space.

I found some blackberries and the exact same plant grew in my garden when I was a kid. It brought so many memories. So maybe you’re somewhere new but you start linking places and things because of the memories you've experienced and what you’re experiencing now. So maybe you’ve never seen that tree but you know how to look at it. You know how to go through this uneven terrain because of the ones you've already gone through.

And in that moment with the blackberries, there were a lot of memories coming back to me from my childhood, so I took some fibres, natural fibres I brought with me from the Andes, and I started tying pieces along the balustrade, putting knots to remember this place and these thoughts, creating a small weaving piece that tied me to this place and my past at the same time. Because there's always something in you, your memory, your experiences, that shapes you. For me, many of these references come from Ecuador but there's always a part of me that says, I'm not that, I'm not this, and I’d rather embrace that ambiguity.

I think from the western perspective, we have completely ignored that need for a natural balance. And I don't mean the West as in Europe or the US, but also Latin America, which is really westernised of course. I feel like we have completely ignored it, and we're seeing so many side effects of that, not only through climate change but in the how difficult is it is for us to adapt now to climate change, because the architecture is so rigid. It doesn't really give us the opportunity to adapt, in a way.

But I think more recently, people are starting to learn from other types of practices and other forms of architecture that were considered, what's the word, vernacular, or ephemeral, just... lesser. They were considered less important, less interesting, less developed. More and more I'm seeing architects going towards those styles and practices. It's a slow process, but people are becoming more conscious of them. I feel architecture should respond to the human body, create adaptable living spaces that shift with time rather than resisting it. There is a positive perspective towards the future when we use the domestic and bodily scale as a starting point of change and encounters, rather than the macro view.

Recently, I was in a moment in my life in which I had so many ideas, but none of them materialised. And I reached out to an indigenous woman from the Amazon that I've been doing some work with. I said, look, I have these ideas and I don't know how to make them happen, but I know I want to make them happen. The idea was that... well, I'm from Ecuador, I'm in London right now, and there's this gap of information. I'm in between. I know a lot of Ecuador, but I don't know enough and I know a lot of the UK, but also not enough to feel part of it.

So I created this community event in which I united women of the Arts and Architecture world in London and indigenous women of the Amazon. It was like 20 artists from different practices and three Amazon women and I invited them to do a tapestry altogether. It wasn't in person – I went to Ecuador and did some work on it with the Amazon women, then I brought it with me here. We found this idea of sort of mapping with colours and we had a call where I translated between the two groups. But I saw the women here thinking how special it was to be talking to a woman that grew up in the forest in the Amazon, and they were actually caring and paying attention and being present in that moment.

Everyone finds their own way of connecting, or creating this relationship with nature in a different sense. For me, the ritual of walking establishes relationships between the body and what surrounds me. It’s a very different experience and form of research to be in motion than to be still. When I'm in London, walking is the key to connecting, seeing the sky, feeling the wind, the rain, anything that makes me have this exchange between my body and the space around me. But I have friends who connect with nature through cooking, for example. Cooking together can be a way of experiencing nature. It can be not even outside, but a lot is happening there.

To draw another parallel with indigenous women in the Amazon, they live within the forest but for them, the term nature doesn't really exist. They create these structures within the Amazon, and they have their own urban, social community systems. And that's the same as we do here. We cook together, we do something, whatever it is, create, read together. That’s a ritual as well and I think that's a way of connecting with nature, through people. If you think about it, being with other humans is experiencing nature in a different way. People build rituals, because we're humans, and we all need them.