Medellín, 2021
In 2021, I returned to Medellín, my hometown, for the first time since finishing my PhD. I stayed for two months, walking the city’s streets with a different gaze—one shaped by years of thinking about artifacts, fragments, and infrastructures. This time, I wasn’t looking for order but for the interruptions, the temporary repairs, the improvisations that keep a city moving despite its cracks.
I called them glitch infrastructures—sidewalks that, although broken, still worked. Holes filled with wood planks, tiles replaced by improvised patches of cement, or stones shifted just enough to let water flow. Each repair carried a small story of adaptation and survival. These glitches revealed an urban intelligence distributed across materials, workers, and passers-by: a choreography of care that kept things functioning, if only barely.
This work became part of the Tarde series, an attempt to document and think with failure. Rather than treating brokenness as a deficit, I approached it as a method—a way to read the city through its temporary fixes and unstable continuities. Glitch Infrastructures was a way of asking what remains operational when systems fail, and how repair can exist without perfection.
At the same time, another theme began to take shape: the presence of rats in the city. These animals moved through sewers, markets, and alleys, co-producing the urban with humans in hidden ways. I followed them in field notes, conversations, and drawings, observing how their trails intersected with the infrastructures of waste, food, and shelter. The rat became an ethnographic guide, an uninvited collaborator who revealed the porousness of human spaces.
This encounter—between rats and people—opened new methodological and ethical questions. How do we write about beings that are simultaneously abjected and infrastructural? How do we account for the labor of those whose presence sustains the city precisely by being denied? The rat-human relation became a conceptual hinge, a prototype for my later project on multispecies encounters in Berlin.
In retrospect, Medellín felt like both a return and an experiment. It was a city of layered memories and renewed methods—a place where the field became both literal and diagrammatic. My walks, photos, and sketches were part of a growing visual notebook that continued to merge ethnography and design, documenting glitches, encounters, and the aesthetic of the almost-broken.
Back in Europe, I realized how much of my later work had already been rehearsed there, in those streets. Glitch Infrastructures and the rat studies taught me to see the city as a multispecies assemblage of improvisations. Medellín was not just a site but a studio of failure and resilience, where ethnography itself learned to walk unevenly—and still work.