Wawa Pullkay en Valle del Colca, Perú

Wawa Pukllay, which means children playing on Quechua, was the invitation of the Social Latin American Workshop 2013 consisting on taking advantage of specific places from different locations at the Colca Valley, to the creation of conditions that would enable the empowerment by a special user: children.

During a two week-period on April 2013, Latin American students gathered in working groups, with tutors from different nationalities, to develop and build permanent equipment.

The work team located in the village of Coporaque agreed a twofold goal:

First, the reproduction of conditions that strengthen and amplify social relations and the opportunities of identification with the space, being attractive to more people, providing incentives for it’s use. This, implied to absorb and integrate existing social and geographical relations, to generate new areas of recognition and approach attempting to transmit local information transparently.

The second goal joined the assistant student to manufacturing practices, and, consequently, the recognition of the individual instrumental potential.

The experience was developed through specific exercises in actual scale and bounded in instrumental terms and materials, promoting management and assosiation with collaborative approach. This, as an instance of action and learning, ie doing things.

The team worked the relationship object-surface through the materiality of space (land and pasture), local materials (chaclas), and the recovery of existing artifacts which were already familiar to users. The intention was that the original object pass to a physical condition that causes a fully updated dialogue to the original or vernacular logic, creating almost spontaneously new interaction systems, leading to a different support.

In parallel, opportunities were identified and incorporated from each local cultural event engendered in any corner, and incite us to use notions differently, like the spontaneous, playfulness, the everyday, the symbolic, the subversive, pedagogical, the accidental and ordinary as the basis of a new program capable of generating encounter and even to invent new practices.

According to everything described, it arises the development of a playground, a scenario that blends with the surrounding nature, a place made for the encounter defined by the user sensations, without reading predisposed to its route, where topography plays a crucial stage posing elevations and depressions allowing a new comprehension of the surface by the child, a topography that adapts to existing gaming devices and achieves an important link between the last scenario with the new park.

The idea is to create an inhabited forest of chaclas or masts over six feet tall, arranged in all the extension of the place, where the child explores the landscape-park, approaching up the opportunity to appropriation as experience.

This “inhabited forest” allows “architecturising” the proposal, turning it into a space where the shadow, light and height (verticality), allows to understand the park differently for each one of the visitors.

The project delivers an open and accessible space for the distention and appropriation of all an isolated population, and with a very few resources, but with a strong conviction that the transformation of this space contributes and generates a significant contribution, on collective relations of the inhabitants of the community of Coporaque in the Colca Valley.