Collective Identity Based on Urban Art in Medellín, Colombia

Abstract

This article collects the partial results of an investigation that proposes to understand the relationship between social groups in the territories and the manifestation of urban art as agents of identity construction, in Medellin, Colombia. The methodology implemented was qualitative, phenomenological, whose scope was descriptive. A content analysis was carried out based on the manifestations of urban art identified and their relationship with the construction of identity based on aesthetic coexistence. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with members of various urban art collectives in the center, west and south of the city, traced from visual ethnography. These territories comprise Comuna 13, the Ayacucho Tramway Corridor and the central and southern zones as an aesthetic unit. Based on this, a historical reconstruction of urban art in Medellín was proposed and the comparative analysis of two types of artistic intervention in the city: the one that arise from local and independent social organizations and the one that is implemented from the institutional framework. As a result, it was found that the urban art of the city has its origins in the independent sociocultural dynamics, which would later be institutionalized, dynamizing historical, social, aesthetic and economic transformation in the intervened environments. Collective identities arise from this process, which are derived from inhabiting the aesthetic, urban and public space, either as an inhabitant and/or as the protagonist of artistic intervention.