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-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 collaborate. The locality, home to around 700,000 inhabitants distributed across more than 360 barrios, is one of Bogotá’s most unequal districts (SURVAMOS & Endémico Andino, 2021).  With steep topography, self-built housing, and limited infrastructure, Ciudad Bolívar has long faced environmental degradation and social marginalisation. Museo Libre emerged as a creative response to these conditions—an initiative that reimagines the periphery as a living network of collaboration and cultural production rather than neglect.
-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.
-Each mural is co-produced through situated collaboration. Residents offer wall space, help prepare surfaces, and share local stories that shape artistic themes (SURVAMOS & Endémico Andino, 2021). Artists frequently reuse leftover or donated paint, turning material scarcity into creative opportunity. Through these interactions, Museo Libre embodies McFarlane’s (2021) concept of generative translation, where learning and transformation arise through collective, place-based action. It also resonates with Czarniawska’s (2010) notion of action nets, in which organisation emerges from interconnected everyday activities rather than hierarchical design.
-From an Actor-Network Theory (ANT) perspective, Museo Libre operates as a living actor-network—a system in which human and non-human actors (artists, citizens, paints, bricks, rivers, and hillsides) cooperate to produce new social relations (Latour, 1996). Within this distributed system, agency is relational, as walls, colours and materials actively mediate encounters and meanings (Law, 2008). As Lucci (2025) explains, such devices illustrate how creativity and matter form distributed technologies of agency capable of transforming both perception and territory. Museo Libre therefore functions as a hybrid socio-material infrastructure, generating what Thieme (2021) terms infrastructures of care—sustaining collaboration, resilience, and visibility in Bogotá’s most stigmatised peripheries.
-Museo Libre operates not in isolation but as part of a complex ecological and infrastructural web that includes TransMiCable, Quebrada Limas River, La Doña Juana Landfill, and the Páramo de Sumapaz. Each of these actors contributes to the material and symbolic flows of the city—circulating people, waste, water and meaning. Museo Libre reinterprets these flows by transforming visual and sensory waste—dilapidated façades, polluted walls, and the visual monotony of brick and dust—into a shared cultural surface. Through this process, waste becomes medium: pigment and decay are absorbed into the murals, converting residue into representation (SURVAMOS & Endémico Andino, 2021).
-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.