Deep inside the Amazon rainforest, floating and stilted communities have resided alongside the Amazon River for thousands of years, developing a unique riverine culture connected to the floodplain's rich biodiversity. Due to ecosystem changes in the region - such as mining, agriculture, oil extraction and wildfires - hundreds of thousands of Indigenous people migrated from the jungle to Amazonian cities such as Iquitos, Peru, maintaining their traditionally designed communities in informal settlements on the city's floodplain edges.
Unfortunately, these communities are now under threat of forced relocation and cultural eradication. The unique challenges those communities face and the celebration of their traditional ways of living connected to nature are the subject of a new Penn State College of Arts and Architecture Stuckeman School exhibition: "Tres Comunidades, Un Rio: Life within Peru's urban Amazonian floodplains."
The international traveling exhibition will run from Feb. 17 to March 4 in the Borland Project Space at 125 Borland Building Penn State University Park. A reception with Peruvian and U.S. research team members, where regional Peruvian refreshments will be served, will be held on Sunday, March 2, at 5 p.m. as part of the Stuckeman School's Research Symposium titled "Biophilia: Designing for Animals." Complementary registration for the symposium is being offered to Penn State faculty and students until 11:59 p.m. on Feb. 23 with the use of the promo code BIOPHILIA25 (case-sensitive) at checkout.
The exhibition and reception on March 2 are free and open to the public.
"Tres Comunidades, Un Rio" showcases photography, community drawings and research data to portray the relocation, biodiversity, One Health perspective, connections to nature and the overall strength of these unique communities.
The exhibition originated in Iquitos, the subject of the exhibition, and traveled to Seattle in December 2024. Following its run at Penn State, the exhibition will travel to New York City and Lima, Peru, with the locations yet to be determined.
The exhibition will showcase three communities in Iquitos: Claverito, Bajo Belen and Nuevo Belen. Using an interdisciplinary mix of arts and sciences, the exhibition will advocate for floodplain communities while highlighting their traditional ways of living. The interdisciplinary team includes researchers and artists from Penn State, University of Washington, Centro de Investigaciones Tecnológicas Biomédicas y Medioambientales (CITBM), Universidad Nacional de la Amazonia Peruana, Traction and the National Institutes of Health Fogarty Global Health Program.
"Our team of Peruvian and U.S. researchers documented two traditionally designed floodplain communities and a relocation community that the Peruvian government had already started, to understand their health differences, stories and culture, and to celebrate their unique lifestyle," said Leann Andrews, who organized the exhibition. She is an assistant professor of landscape architecture, Stuckeman Career Development Assistant Professor in Design and a researcher in the Ecology plus Design (E+D) research center. "The exhibition is about storytelling, through the lens of photography and hand drawings, and it is also about data. We've discovered that there's a lot of power in data when you have it, but the stories are what really speak to people."
