Utopian Infrastructure: The Campesino Basketball Court 5 Favorite 

Practitioner: 

Date: 

May 30 2023

The Mexican Pavilion is an immersive space based on a 1:1 scale fragment of the expanded model of the campesino basketball court, an infrastructure that has become repurposed as a space for poly- and pluri-valent processes of decolonisation in Mexico’s indigenous communities. Our case study on these basketball courts functions as a laboratory for investigation of the adaptations and transformations that have allowed these spaces to transcend their original purpose and to become instead focal points for the construction of political, social, and cultural processes.
The campesino basketball court, repurposed, is much more than the deconstruction of a Western sporting facility: it is the foundational unit of construction upon which indigenous utopias build cultures of resistance.

Credit: https://www.labiennale.org/en/architecture/2023/mexico

Posted by leviya on

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Effectiveness

How does this project help?

Timeframe For change

decolonization in Mexico, inspiring others to think about decolonization where they're from/how they could think about the campesino court and places like it in their own communities

Notes

I think it had more of an emotional *affect* than effect. It worked to create and foster community and was a good example of transporting a Mexican cultural phenomenon into the space of the Venice Biennale. I also had fun playing basketball on the court and I think getting people to see sports as activism is really important in a landscape where sports are viewed as jocky and unintellectual activities