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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.

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.

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.