David Beriss
Last week we announced the winners of this year’s SAFN Anthropology Day Photo Contest. You can read that post here. We had a tie for first place this year, between Bula Wayessa (see this post) and Natasha Bernstein Bunzl, whose photos we are publishing today. Natasha is a PhD student at NYU. Her photos caught the judges’ eyes for the way they illustrate people working to create space to grow food. This is particularly intriguing in an urban environment. She wrote this about the photos:
I took these photos while volunteering with a community compost project, the paquerxs. They are one of many community groups in Bogotá that build pacas digestoras Silva, a composting technique invented by Colombian environmentalist Guillermo Silva Pérez. You can follow the various projects in Bogotá directly through their Instagram account @paquerxsbogota.
Every week the volunteers gather to build square mounds of leaves and grasses in which they compress organic waste. The tight wooden box that holds the structure together limits the oxygen that the waste has contact with, leading the organic material to ferment instead of rot. After months of decomposition, the group plants fruit trees and other edible plants in the mounds which are available freely to the community.
Congratulations, Natasha!
