A floating stage for living on water in the Amazon

This article was originally published on Domus 1110, March 2026. 

Arriving in Iquitos, in the Peruvian Amazon, means accepting that the urban certainties so familiar to us must be left behind. There are no roads leading here. The journey is interrupted and resumes by air or by river. This territory demands a first renunciation: the belief that the world is always solid ground. The air feels heavy, and the city appears surrounded by rainforest – humid, dense, alive. Here, time is not organised by seasons, but by the rise and fall of the river.

Iquitos is noise, commerce, mototaxis, exotic fruits, music filtering through everything. But it is also a city crossed by absences: intermittent services, inequality, urban edges where the State arrives late – or not at all. And on one of those edges – or rather, in a territory that refuses to be an edge – Belén emerges. During the rainy season, the Itaya River rises and the streets disappear. Houses lift themselves on stilts. Canoes replace cars. For those coming from cities anchored to solid ground, Belén may seem chaotic, dangerous and precarious. But that impression does not last long. A careful look reveals another kind of order: an amphibious organisation built from knowledge of water, shared experience and constant adaptation.

“It’s not that Belén has no rules,” says Daniel Canchán Zúñiga, co-founder with Paula Villar Pastor of Lima-based architecture studio Espacio Común. “It’s that its rules are not written on the ground, but in the river.” In Belén, permanence does not mean immobility, but resistance to change. Architecture here is measured by its ability to remain useful when everything around it transforms. Intervening in a place like this requires more than technique. “It requires unlearning,” says Canchán. “Before thinking about architecture, we had to understand how life works here,” recalls Villar. “How houses are tied, how rafts are built, how daily life is organised when the ground disappears.”

Paula Villar Pastor, Espacio Común

In that pre-design phase, architecture becomes human, social and environmental relationships. Espacio Común’s thinking is practised before it is proclaimed. Working in Belén did not mean “improving” the neighbourhood or making it resemble a conventional city. It meant recognising that apparent precariousness is not a lack of knowledge, but the presence of other forms of knowledge. “Belén is not a void waiting for solutions,” says Canchán. “It is a place densely built from experience.”

That stance is political. In a historically stigmatised context, choosing to intervene from a position of respect means challenging the dominant narrative. Architecture ceases to be a heroic gesture and becomes a tool capable of reinforcing the symbolic dignity of a place without erasing or disguising it. During the rise of the Itaya River in May 2025, Espacio Común designed and built a floating stage for Muyuna Fest, a film festival promoted by a group of young filmmakers with the aim of decentralising cinema and linking it to social and community processes – transforming it into a tool that strengthens identities, memories and territorial struggles. Due to its collaborative nature, the event involves cultural organisations and grassroots collectives, members of local communities and international filmmakers. It is a festival that defends the world’s forests, giving voice – through cinema – to Amazonian communities.

Located in front of the Estrellita de Jesús school, the project allows itself to be guided by the territory. The gesture might seem surreal: a stage floating in the middle of the river, transformed into an open-air cinema. Yet its coherence is absolute. “We didn’t want to bring in an alien infrastructure,” explains Villar. “We wanted to work with what already exists – with amphibious logic, with materials, with local knowledge.” The circular platform – approximately 14 metres in diameter – was built entirely from materials found in the immediate surroundings: lightweight topa logs, branches, natural fibres. Everything was assembled with hand tools. The structural base is organised into triangular modules forming a decagon, upon which a radial wooden deck is laid.

Daniel Canchán, Espacio Común

The geometry evokes the muyuna, a characteristic whirlpool of Amazonian rivers that gives the festival its name. With no fixed anchors, the structure floats freely, embracing the constant movement of the water. A secondary module houses the projection and sound equipment. Rising from the main platform is a seven-metre-high trapezoidal structure that functions as an open projection box facing the river. Its inclination responds to the projector’s angle while simultaneously framing large murals painted on its sides.

The stage was built in just two weeks, but that time condensed a deep body of collective knowledge. Local master builders – fishermen and boat artisans – participated actively. Much of the base was assembled directly on the water, using bodies as tools, counterweights and measures. The facades are woven from branches, reeds and leaves collected from nearby chacras, forming patterns inspired by Kukama iconography, in homage to this Indigenous people. In parallel, children from the neighbourhood participated in workshops led by artist David Orlando del Águila. Their drawings were transformed into fabric murals that wrap the platform, incorporating collective memory and local narratives. Each night of the festival, more than 50 canoes gathered around the stage. The river became the cinema hall, and the water became the audience seating. Cinema turned into a shared, floating, communal experience.

Paula Villar Pastor, Espacio Común

The project also activated a network of local micro-economies: river transport, food preparation, collective labour. And when the festival ended, the stage did not disappear. The platform continues to be used as a school dock, a playground and a daily meeting place. The ephemeral becomes floating public infrastructure.

For Espacio Común, that may be the greatest achievement. “We didn’t want the work to leave with us,” says Villar. “We wanted it to stay – but not as a monument, rather as something useful.” The stage does not solve Belén. It does not intend to. What it does is something more subtle and powerful: it changes the way Belén is seen. Against narratives that insist on defining it as an uninhabitable place, architecture responds by affirming the legitimacy of amphibious urban life. It demonstrates that there is territorial intelligence where others see only lack. And it proposes a replicable, sensitive model of intervention, deeply rooted in place. With this festival, a milestone was marked in the history of cinema and of the world’s rainforests. By emerging over Amazonian waters, in a profoundly symbiotic relationship between architecture, place and environment, one of architecture’s deepest purposes became visible: serving those who need it most. A purpose that could only be fulfilled by meeting the water at its level – by deeply understanding the place, listening before proposing, and accepting that to create, to intervene and to act, sometimes one must get wet.