A school inspired by the lessons of water to restore the Biobío River basin

Kümelko III: Visions of the Pitrantu is the title of the third edition of a biocultural and community restoration school that emerged around the Biobío River basin, a project that won the 2024 version of our FMA Fund. Navigation routes, environmental education, and water monitoring have been part of its stages. In this edition, a series of workshops were implemented in collaboration with the Los Álamos Technical Training Center (CFT), based on methodologies involving role-playing games, meditations, and the collective creation of a fanzine.

The Kümelko School—which means learning from water—has developed various editions focusing on biocultural and community restoration in the Nahuelbuta mountain range, in the Biobío Region (1). The Pangue micro-basin was the territory where the third edition of this educational initiative took place. Workshops were implemented to create characters for a role-playing game, conduct meditations to imagine possible futures, and produce a fanzine that gathered collective poetic reflections as a way to connect with the territory through sensitive approaches. This proposal was one of the winners of our FMA competitive grant fund.

The community of students and teachers from CFT Los Álamos took part in the Visions of the Pitrantu edition of this community school, which emphasizes the development of biocultural knowledge in a territory affected by phenomena such as deforestation, the forestry monopoly, and a complex intercultural reality composed largely of the Mapuche Lafkenche population (3).

The school was conceived as a biocultural restoration laboratory on the Arauco coast (2), where nature became the game board, and participants created characters identified with local species to develop skills.

Toward the recomposition of Nahuelbuta’s socio-hydric fabric

This area is characterized by its network of springs that originate in mountain wetlands, where community groups from the Biobío basin and the Nahuelbuta mountain range converge. These groups have participated in learning processes in which gamification aimed to revitalize the relationship between the basin’s inhabitants and the pitrantu (pitra forests in Mapudungun).

The proposed game included navigation dynamics through the territory’s streams and wetlands with students from Los Álamos—aged 20 to 50—from this intercultural technical training institute, along with relevant local actors. The experience established links between bodies of water, pitrantu, and participants who traveled through the pitra forests that protect water in the streams, wetlands, and lakes of the area.

Nicolás Román, one of the project’s representatives, explained that “caricatures based on emotions were created to design characters capable of recognizing the ecosystem—a process guided by artists.” He added that a game board was created to represent, through a map, the species identified along the routes.

Thus, environmental monitoring, an artistic logbook, geographic exploration, and kayaking were part of an itinerary designed to promote the appreciation and relevance of the pitrantu, degraded by the forestry industry in the region. Some of the creations resulting from these explorations were epews—oral stories—and game drawings, which were systematized and published in a co-designed collaboration with participants. The result was a fanzine addressing community water management, native forest conservation and restoration, and the care of local biodiversity, contributing to the regeneration of Nahuelbuta’s socio-hydric fabric.

“Through tenderness, play, and sensitivity, the illustrations played with the idea of pseudo-spells—clusters of words forming a kind of collective poem that served as the opening and closing of a portal,” Román elaborated. He explained that some of the questions used as activations were: How does water inhabit us? What do the waterlands of the pitrantu teach us? How do we interweave ourselves with the humid forest and still waters?

Among the inspirations for the project across its various editions is the influence of Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui’s thought and her call for curiosity and participatory research as ways to connect with the environment and lived experiences. Likewise, in environmental monitoring, tools such as camera traps have been used, while environmental education workshops have focused on collecting data on biodiversity and water quality.

Footnotes

1. Among the project’s objectives are to revitalize the relationship between the basin’s inhabitants and the pitrantu; implement an environmental education program centered on pitrantu conservation; foster community participation in ecological restoration activities; build a shared narrative about the lived territorial process; and share a restorative experience at a socio-emotional level with participants from socio-environmental and Mapuche organizations.
2. The school has received support from major initiatives and brands such as National Geographic and Patagonia.
3. Kümelko is a collective project resulting from an alliance among various organizations from the Biobío Region and Lafkenche communities, an Indigenous coastal people from southern Chile. The main executing groups include Bestias del Sur Salvaje, Fundación Regenerativa, Fundación Nahuelbuta, Fundación Manzana Verde, and the Comunidad Lafkenche Rayén de Pangue. The project began its implementation in early 2022 with support from a National Geographic grant.