This intervention has been made by the collective of artists and architects Boamistura at the heart of the Colonia Infonavit Independencia, close to the Jalisco Stadium (Mexico).
Boamistura is a multidisciplinary team with roots in graffiti born at the end of 2001 in Madrid. Their work is mainly developed in public space, as a tool to transform the city and create links between people.
The project covers 1.000 m2 of the sport courts, and the facades of the buildings facing them.The housing is located at the north of Guadalajara. It is estimated to have around 2.500 inhabitants, living in 1.024 apartments, distributed in 66 similar towers. It was built by the Infonavit in the early 80’s, and today represents one of the several stigmatized areas of the city, due to the explicit drug dealing problem.A local survey made by the artists brought out that the Municipality had never allocated economic resources to its maintenance.The perception is that of an abandoned place, with a very complex living dynamic, but with a lot of possibilities to work in order to reverse this dynamic, creating a new usage memory among the neighbors and create appropriation. In the wixárika universe, everything is related, everything and everyone is in constant communication. That is why, Boamistura chose the Wixárika people as inspiration for our work.
The process has been developed together with the Department of Culture of Guadalajara, that took the challenge of activate the area through «Cultura Itinerante» activities, «Arte sin Paredes» and «Festival Sucede». The goal was to prepare the community for the upcoming project. After the first contact with the local community the surveys and talks they created two design options. Both design options were presented to the neighbors, so that they could vote. They finally chose Nierika. The last stage was the execution, and also was conceived collaboratively and with a transgenerational approach.
This way of building cities could be a model today, in order to develop the society of the future.
Recommended by Luisa Bravo
Main Source: https://boamistura.com/en/projects/
