Wawa Pukllay | Coporaque, Valle del Colca | Perú | 2013
The Wawa Pukllay project, which means Children Playing in Quechua, is the result of the invitation extended to us by the “Taller Social Latinoamericano”, which consisted on the use of specific sites in different locations in the Colca Valley, Perú.
This sites meets a number of conditions for empowering opportunities for its final users: the local children.
Over a period of two weeks we gathered in the village of Coporaque with a group of architecture students from throughout Latin America to develop and build equipment to strengthen and amplify social relations and the possibilities of identifying with this sites, becoming attractive to the most amount of people, and offering incentives for their use. This implied absorbing and integrating existing social and geographic relationships to generate new areas of recognition in an approach to ensure -in a transparent manner- the transmition of local information.
It is important to note that the project allowed college students to develop a real and bounded scale exercise in instrumental and materials terms (low tech), and encourage horizontal partnership with management and collaborative approach. All the foregoing action as an instance for learning through making.
The operation to activate the space was divided into two strategies:
First, not promoting a rigid regulatory plan for the proposal, but rather to identify and incorporate local cultural opportunities in every manifestation of the people in the village of Coporaque, which would allow us to use different notions such as the spontaneous, the ludic, the daily, the symbolic, the subversive, the pedagogical, the accidental and ordinary, etc as the basis for a program capable of generating encounter and even stablishing new activities and relations.
Second, work the object-surface relation through spatial materiality (soil and grass), local building materials and technologies (chaclas and logs) and the recovery of existing artifacts (slide and seesaw) which whom the children are already udsed to and sometimes make use of them and by extention of the site. The main intention is that the starting object went to a material state that causes a completely updated of its original / vernacular logic and almost spontaneously creating new systems of interaction, leading to a different media dialogue.
Based on the described ideas we develop a playground, a park-like landscape sort of a "penetrable forest" without predisposed readings for its exploration. Chaclas masts of more than six meters high arranged througout the site and topography elevations and depressions build a place that achieves an important link between the past with the new scenario, where children can explore and take over the space trough drifting and experiencing it.
The project delivers a crossbreed equipment, a natural-artificial landscape open and accessible to the distension and ownership of an entire isolated population with very few resources but with a strong conviction that the transformation of this space will generates a significant contribution of the collective relations of the inhabitants of the community Coporaque in the Colca Valley.
WorkTeam:
Students from Coporaque Workshop – T.S.L 2103
Tutors: AGA estudio creativo (Venezuela), Cesar Acurio (Perú), Enrique Villacis (Ecuador), Lara Plácido (Portugal), Maximillian Nowotka (Venezuela), y Rocio Cayllahua (Perú).
Location: Coporaque, Colca Valley, Perú.
Year: April 2013
Project Area: 776 m2.
Budget: 1200$.
Materials: Chaclas, Reclaimed land of the place, Replanted pasture of surrounding areas, and reusing existing artifacts-games on the spot.
Organizers: C.L.E.A, Santa María Catholic University, San Pablo University, Alas Peruanas University.
Sponsors: Coporaque Municipality, Provincial Arequipa Municipality, San Agustín National University.
