"Indigenous technologies are not lost or forgotten, only hidden by the shadow of progress in the most remote places on Earth". In her book Lo-TEK: design by radical indigenism, Julia Watson proposes to revalue the techniques of construction, production, cultivation and extraction carried out by diverse remote populations who, generation after generation, have managed to keep alive ancestral cultural practices integrated with nature, with a low environmental cost and simple execution. While modern societies tried to conquer nature in the name of progress, these indigenous cultures worked in collaboration with nature, understanding ecosystems and species cycles to articulate their architecture into an integrated and symbiotically interconnected whole.
While society values and proudly preserves the architectural artefacts and artefacts of cultures that no longer exist - such as the pyramids of Giza that are over four thousand years old - the practices of the living are displaced, however ancient they may be. Few people know, for example, about the technology behind the construction of the floating islands of the Ma'dan people in the wetlands of southern Iraq, even though they are more than 6,000 years old. Julia dedicates her editorial work "to the next seven generations" and hopes to illuminate a new path where these practices are revalued and, by adapting to contemporary needs, can promote a future where the notions of technology and nature are worked in an integrated way.
