The end of the world as it was known
The coronavirus outbreak has been a global shock, an unexpected disease that came to change our daily life. In the beginning, we thought, or at least I did, it would not last long, but has been six months that have changed our world vision, priorities, and most of all our feeling of certainty.
During the pandemic, I have been reading about native Americans. The portraits from the Kawésqar’, a Southern-Chilean Canoe Tribe, called my attention. The photographs were taken between 1900 and 1960, years in which the population declined from 500 to 47 people, and they illustrate the pain in their sight, they were seeing their entire world fall apart. Like most of the native communities in America, they were forced to leave their traditions behind and assimilate a completely new culture that was being imposed.
In the year 2020, no one has imposed a new culture to our society but we have been constrained to stay at home and change our whole lifestyle, which is for sure easier than what our ancestors had to live, but I can’t hesitate to empathize with the feeling of uncertainty, with the feeling that there is no way back. Native families kept telling stories to guide each other through their knowledge and preserve their culture, generations to generation mourning their traditions. I ask myself, as urban or landscape designers, have we been empathetic enough to these feelings when designing public spaces? Is the cultural heritage part of the ecosystem we study?