“TERRITORY OF WISDOM”

Exhibition: TIME SPACE EXISTENCE, Venice, Italy
Dates: From May 18 to November 23, 2025
Organized by: European Cultural Centre

          Photograph 1. “Territory of Wisdom” Palazzo Mora 2025 © Celestia Studio

The European Cultural Centre (ECC) is an organization founded in 2002 by Dutch artist Rene Rietmeyer, dedicated to promoting global cultural exchange through art and architecture exhibitions, symposia, and interdisciplinary projects. With an international presence, the ECC seeks to raise awareness, celebrate cultural diversity, and foster mutual learning through artistic and creative practices across disciplines such as visual arts, architecture, dance, theater, music, and literature.

(Source: Official ECC website)

This year, Semillas is participating in the Time Space Existence exhibition with the project Territorio de los Saberes. This show, held in parallel with the Venice Biennale, brings together international proposals that promote sustainability, material innovation, and sociocultural engagement through architecture and art.

Photograph 2. “Territory of Wisdom” Palazzo Mora 2025 © Celestia Studio

THE PROJECT:

Territory of Wisdom is a spatial and curatorial reflection on the relationship between architecture, pedagogy, and the Amazonian territory. The exhibition brings together some of the main results of the eponymous program developed by the Semillas Association since 2021, continuing more than a decade of participatory work in rural schools of the Peruvian Amazon.

The exhibition is organized as a layered narrative journey that reflects the program’s conceptual structure: the seed – infrastructure, the tree – pedagogy, and the forest – scalability. Each represents a connecting axis between architecture, education, and territorial knowledge.

The journey begins with a territorial map and a television screen projecting a collective video that functions as a living archive of memories and processes. The first video is a tribute to Ulises Rumiche, an indigenous elder murdered in 2021, who worked with Semillas and left us with a profound reflection: being indigenous could be a source of pride, but the hegemony of knowledge (Quijano) has associated us with the uncivilized. His testimony leads us to ask: what if the school were a bridge where innovation consists in valuing who we are? What if indigenous youth, instead of migrating, found economic and vital sustenance in the forest?

Fotografía 3 “Territory of Wisdom” Palazzo Mora 2025 © Celestia Studio

From there, the cartography expands and architecture is revealed. A series of photographs of architectural processes appear, showing the school as an open space, as living architecture built with local materials. A school without walls where children play, learn, and connect with the landscape. It is infrastructure as seed.

In the next layer, pedagogy takes shape in two symbolic artifacts. A 12-meter canvas, created together with 32 architects during the Territorio de los Saberes workshop, led by Semillas and La Cabina de la Curiosidad at the Mencoriari secondary school, narrates through myth the story of the “mother forest”: pharmacy, hardware store, food source, and home. In the face of deforestation, extractivism, and violence, the figure of the “Grandfather Moon” appears — a bridge between ancestral knowledge and the present. Through him, we understand that the school can reconnect us with the territory and remind us that true innovation arises from recognizing who we already are.

Photograph 4. Canvas created during the “Territory of Wisdom” workshop, CN Mencoriari © Jeffry Paredes

Next to the canvas hang the wooden pieces of the xylotheque, carved by students from the Chuquibambilla secondary school. Each piece comes from the Peruvian Amazon and is accompanied by a voice: the story of a tree, of a wounded ecosystem that needs care and attention. The local thus becomes universal.

Photograph 5. Xylotheque made by the secondary students of CN Chuquibambilla © Semillas

Photograph 6 “Lienzo” exhibited at Time Space Existence, Palazzo Mora 2025 © Celestia Studio

Territory of Wisdom presents living processes—migrating voices that seek to inspire a new way of practicing architecture and pedagogy. It proposes a vision of the school not as a container of imposed knowledge, but as a place where local wisdom, cultural memory, and ecological identity come together.

The exhibition closes with an invitation to the visitor: to take a postcard — a piece of forest knowledge — and to leave a message in the collective notebook, whose words will return to the jungle to be shared with the communities.

This exhibition is part of an ongoing effort to weave a replicable model of intercultural rural schools in the Amazon, and to imagine an architecture that listens, accompanies, and transforms from the root.

Photograph 7. Embroidery over a canvas of drawings made by secondary students from CN Mencoriari © Semillas