This month I complete four years of my return to Bogota, my hometown. I have settled up, survived a pandemic, adapted to the everyday life in the Chapinero neighborhood, and mastered cycling and walking mobility in a Latin America megalopolis that is wild, chaotic and vibrant. It is time to start a new creative and inquiry project that aims to map and make visible the infrastructures of the city. From transportation to electric, from telecommunication to recreation, and many other infrastructures, including even nature (particularly the rivers, creeks, trees, marshlands, and mountains), determine the space of everyday life and give shape to the relationships and dynamics that take place in the city. Infrastructures of all kinds, visible and invisible, mediate our lives, shape the movements and circulation of data, information, machines, goods, humans and animals. The materiality of infrastructures allows us to trace them, to reveal them, as a strategy to have a better understanding of the social, political, economic and cultural configurations they make possible. Mapping Bogota’s infrastructures is a method of creative inquiry for questioning the chaos, criticizing urban life, and enjoying and documenting the urban messiness and wilderness of the city.
The project is exploratory, ethnographic and multimodal. I will be posting entries in this blog with some of the developments of the project, assembling texts and photographs, and sometimes videos and maps. In the long term, the contents I will share in this space can become part of a zine, or a series of fanzines. They can also eventually become the material for a more formal publication such as a book or a film documentary.
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