Street Art As a Tool for Anthropological Understanding: The Case of Comuna 13 of Medellin

Urban anthropologists are shifting from traditional paradigms that framed the city merely as the “object” or “context” of research, toward frameworks that emphasize the city as a dynamic process, shaped and reshaped by the city-making practices implemented by its residents (Agier 2020). Concurrently, there is an increasing tendency to employ experimental visual practices to enhance the communication of research findings (Anzoise, Barberi, and Scandurra 2017).

In this presentation, drawing on my ethnographic fieldwork in Comuna 13 of Medellín, Colombia, I will discuss street art as both a powerful ethnographic tool for observing the city as a process and an effective medium for disseminating ethnographic knowledge. Through the presentation, I will showcase five street artworks that visually embody the history and collective memory of the community on the surface of public spaces. These artworks will help the audience immerse themselves in the world of Comuna 13, understand key events in its history and collective memory, and observe its constant process of change and adaptation. In other words, these artworks will allow us to see Comuna 13 not as a static object, but as a dynamic process continuously shaped and reshaped by the city-making practices implemented by its residents.

The case of Comuna 13 demonstrates that street art, while a globally widespread form of artistic expression, embodies deeply contextual and situated elements that can offer innovative pathways for studying complex urban phenomena. Despite this, its potential for anthropological and sociological understanding has yet to be fully explored. This presentation aims to address this gap by offering urban scholars new and fascinating possibilities for analyzing contemporary cities through the lens of street art and for presenting their findings using graphic visualizations.