Civic jungle:
An action that consisted of offering people to wear masks of animals in a public space, while they inhabit the space and walk through it. The idea came from a reflection about how the public space is not a neutral zone of a celebration of difference, but a place of contradictions and imminent conflict, a scenario of territoriality. Despite that, there is an abstract idealized notion of public space that, departing from a conception of urban sociability as civility, hides the deep hostilities, exclusions, and incompatibilities that constitute the wild reality of the public realm, dissimulating its animality with the myth of connivance.
The context of the performance was the center of the city of Medellín, where there are many informal jobs (street vendors, prostitution, drug sales, etc.) that dispute the territory. In addition to class, race, gender and nationality frictions, there are illegal armed groups that maintain order and social control through violence, such as the gang called “Las convivir” (The connivance), whose name paradoxically means peaceful coexistence. During the preparation of the action, tensions arose between some of the participants, related to these types of conflicts.