Stuckeman School exhibition to showcase urban floodplain communities in Peru

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — 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. (Contact Katrina Kasper for the promotional code).

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.”

The exhibition will not only highlight the three communities but also the biodiversity within them. Andrews said that as the government is relocating people from floodplain settlements, they may not be considering how the loss of these communities may also be a loss to ecosystem function, habitat and generational knowledge stewarding the land and river. The relocation communities are also deforesting large tracts of a rare white sand rainforest. Andrews said she wants the exhibition to caution people on the tremendous impact relocation may have on the local people and animals, but that it also impacts the globally significant Amazon Rainforest ecosystem.

“The hypothesis was that the government moving people is better,” she said. “We found that many quality-of-life measures in our research did not show that life was better after they were relocated away from the river. Relocation costs the government more money, and it changes the people of these communities. There's a longing on their part for the river, and there is a loss of their livelihood. There is also a loss of knowledge of their cultural ways of living with water, as well as the loss of the ecosystem, which impacts us all.”

The project, and resulting exhibition, takes a One Health perspective, investigating how the health and wellbeing of people, animals, plants and the environment are all connected.

“It is this understanding that we're connected in these very scientific, biological ways such as disease transmission, but we also have emotional ties, and that is really important,” she said. “While we're facing a changing planet and a loss of biodiversity and ecosystems all over the world, it is also a loss to ourselves and our own health, not to mention the health of all inhabitants of those spaces.”

This project builds off the InterACTION Labs program that Andrews began in 2015 with Coco Alarcon, a Peruvian designer and public health researcher. Their transdisciplinary teams work closely with floodplain communities in Iquitos to improve the built environment conditions and measure the impact on the health of the people and animals who live there.

“There’s a lot to be learned from floating communities, their connection to nature and how they manage the landscape, especially in the face of climate change,” Andrews said.

Andrews also leads a design activism studio course at Penn State that engages with the topic of the exhibition. As part of the course, landscape architecture students and One Health Scholars at Penn State travel to Iquitos over spring break to work with a floodplain community and propose design solutions. The studio and travel are co-led with Rebecca Bachman, a landscape architecture who recently earned her doctorate from the City University of New York, and Xiomara Valdivia Zavaleta of CITBM.

The Penn State One Health Scholars program is co-directed by Justin Brown, assistant teaching professor of veterinary and biomedical sciences; Jennifer Koehl, assistant teaching professor of veterinary and biomedical sciences; Kari Kugler, associate teaching professor of biobehavioral health; Cara Exten, assistant professor of epidemiology; and Andrews. The initiative emerged as a result of an Institute of Energy and the Environment seed grant.

The interrelated research, exhibition, design studio, One Health Scholars Program and symposium are internally sponsored by the Arts and Design Research Incubator, E+D research center, Hamer Center for Community Design, Department of Landscape Architecture, Stuckeman School, College of Arts and Architecture, College of Health and Human Development and the Department of Veterinary and Biomedical Sciences. External to Penn State, the efforts are supported by EarthLab, the University of Washington, CITBM and Traction.