Museo Libre [Atlas : Remains To Be Seen]

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====== Museo Libre ======


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.

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                                                         Fig1. Museo Libre, Colombia.


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.