El Bicho/The critter

Bogotá, Colombia

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El Bicho/The critter

Bogotá, Colombia

Firm

Arquitectura Expandida

Type

Commercial › Pop-Up
Cultural › Pavilion Sculpture
Educational › Other
Government + Health › Community Center
Landscape + Planning › Public Park

STATUS

Built

YEAR

2022

SIZE

0 sqft - 1000 sqft

BUDGET

$0 - 10K

“El bicho” (The Critter) is a guadua (bamboo) structure with a triangular floor plan, which can work as a platform, a space for arranged or spontaneous meetings on the street or Waiting for the weather to clear up.
It was co-designed and co-built between the groups Arquitectura Expandida (activism and city), Distreestyle and Golpe de Barrio (activism and hip-hop), at the initiative and invitation of the latter. The first objective was to install it in the self-managed festival "Aguante el Barrio", which took place on April 3, 2022 in the Metropolitan Park of Porvenir, in the outlying town of Bosa, in Bogotá, where thousands of social housing have been built since 2000, becoming a ghettoized and segregated area.
That is why “El Bicho” was also built with the philosophy of strengthening the daily rap meetings that young people organize every week in this space. Thus, beyond its operational function, “El Bicho” is a manifesto for a collective and self-managed right to the city that questions the verticality of urban powers. “El Bicho” catalyzes the problems of authoritarianism, control, and urban hygiene that police and public institutions exert on young people when they gather in the street. This situation has been clearly revealed in the context of the social outbreak that took place between 2019 and 2021 in Colombia, which includes multiple human rights violations and systematic stigmatization and criminalization of low-income youth, and inhabitants of peripheral areas of the city .
“El bicho” has wheels on two of its three legs, allowing for mobility. This mobility is tactical because it allows us to consider it a movable asset and not real estate. Also, because we could build it in a popular neighborhood, where agreements are made ad-hoc among the neighbors, without bureaucracies or permits; and take it to the metropolitan park, where we would never have been able to build it or negotiate its installation because the regulation of use prioritizes economic use, that is, rent, over non-profit cultural and daily use, becoming the perfect excuse to prevent gatherings of hip hop.
But mobility also has a collective dimension (a group of at least 10 people is needed to move it, so prior agreement must be reached) and performative, since it becomes a whole procession that almost implies a mystical and religious sense of the urban commons .
The installation of “El Bicho” in the Porvenir Park has provoked a socio-institutional dialogue that has revealed conflicts, threats and stigmatizing daily narratives. But it has also stimulated pacts, temporary permits and, ultimately, more horizontal agreements between citizens and public institutions, making visible and addressing serious problems of segregation and urban governance.
In brief, this is a project of governance and, with it, of articulation of polarized languages, such as those of urban management, hiphop -for example, through the rap song "Bichos" where there is a recognition of shared vulnerability- those of the Popular fanzines, or those on architecture, which in this case swing between activist art and urban social mediation.

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El Bicho/The critter

Bogotá, Colombia

El Bicho/The critter

Bogotá, Colombia

Product Spec Sheet

Collaborating Firms

Team