Differences

This shows you the differences between two versions of the page.

--- museo_libre [2025/11/07 14:15] – 25926687
+++ museo_libre [Unknown date] (current) – removed - external edit (Unknown date) 127.0.0.1
@@ Line 1: / Line 1: @@
-Museo Libre, founded in 2013 by the collective SURVAMOS in Ciudad Bolívar, Bogotá, operates as a socio-spatial network where art, materiality, and collective agency collabrate. The locality has a population of around 700,000 inhabitants distributed across more than 360 barrios, making it one of Bogotá’s largest and most socio-economically unequal areas (SURVAMOS & Endémico Andino, 2021). The neighbourhoods have steep topography, self-built housing, limited green infrastructure, and long daily commutes—conditions often associated with what Wacquant (2007) calls territorial stigmatisation. In this context, Museo Libre emerged as a response to social invisibility and marginalisation, seeking to reimagine the periphery as a site of creativity and collective agency.
-The project transforms marginalised neighbourhoods through murals and community participation, reorganising what Latour (1996) defines as an actor-network—a dynamic system of human and non-human actors, including artists, river, buildings, and citizens. Within this structure, agency is relational rather than hierarchical, aligning with Law’s (2008) view that material semiotics reveals how social order emerges through heterogeneous associations.
-In Museo Libre, murals are created through collaboration between artists and residents in Ciudad Bolívar. The first edition in 2013 brought together 13 national and international artists, who worked with local communities to paint about 150 murals across the steep hillsides (Cartel Urbano, 2018). As participation grew, the network expanded rapidly: by 2016, more than 300 murals had been completed in neighbourhoods such as Nueva Colombia, Vista Hermosa, Manitas, and Juan Pablo II (Camacho Botia, 2021). Each stage of the project relied on cooperation—residents offered wall space, helped clean and prepare surfaces, and shared local stories that guided the themes. Artists often reused donated or leftover paint, so the making of murals brought together people, materials, and local conditions in one shared process (SURVAMOS & Endémico Andino, 2021). This practice reflects McFarlane’s (2021) idea of generative translation, where learning and transformation emerge through collective, situated action, and aligns with Czarniawska’s (2010) notion of action networks formed through everyday collaboration.
-Maintenance and repainting have since become part of the project’s routine. These activities require coordination and resource-sharing, forming what Thieme (2021) calls “infrastructures of care.” Such networks help sustain relationships among neighbours and create informal systems for managing public space. The reuse of materials links the project to local waste cycles, turning discarded paint and damaged walls into visible symbols of renewal. In this sense, Museo Libre demonstrates distributed agency (Lucci, 2025), where people, tools, and materials collectively shape their environment. Beyond art, the project provides a practical model of how creative practice can reinterpret pollution, neglect, and inequality through continuous, cooperative action in the everyday urban landscape.
-References:
-Armiero, M. (2021) Wasteocene: Stories from the Global Dump. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
-Czarniawska, B. (2010) ‘Going back to go forward: On studying organizing in action nets’, Emergence: Complexity and Organization, 12 (2), pp. 13–23.
-Latour, B. (1996) ‘On Actor-Network Theory: A Few Clarifications’, Soziale Welt, 47 (4), pp. 369–381. Law, J. (2008) ‘Actor Network Theory and Material Semiotics’, in Turner, B. (ed.) The New Blackwell Companion to Social Theory. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 141–158.
-McFarlane, C. (2021) ‘Generative Translation: Re-thinking Urban Learning’, Urban Studies, 58 (4), pp. 707–726.
-SURVAMOS & Endémico Andino (2021) ‘Image-Maker in Residence: Museo Libre’, The Sociological Review Magazine, 7 April. Available at: https://thesociologicalreview.org/image-maker-in-residence/museo-libre/ (Accessed: 7 November 2025).
-Thieme, T. (2021) Waste and Urban Order: Infrastructures of Care. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
-Lucci, L. (2025) Lecture Notes on Actor Devices and Distributed Agency. Manchester Metropolitan University.