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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 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.
Each mural is co-produced through communication, turning the physical environment into an expressive medium for community identity (SURVAMOS & Endémico Andino, 2021). This reflects McFarlane’s (2021) concept of generative translation, where learning and transformation take place through situated practice. Czarniawska (2010) similarly describes such processes as action networks, where organization arises from interconnected actions rather than hierarchical planning. Museo Libre acts as a device of collective translation, mediating between materials, people, and meanings.
Museo Libre enacts what Thieme (2021) calls infrastructures of care, maintaining community relations through collective artistic labour. In social dimension, it reclaims territory and narrative and embodys Armiero’s (2021) idea of environmental resistance. As Lucci (2025) suggests, such actor-networks operate as distributed technologies of agency. In that case, creativity, materiality, and politics intertwine to reconfigure urban peripheries. Overall, Bolivar City itself has become a living museum - a space for shared identity, resilience, and empowering relationships.
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.