Abstract

Mexican artist Abraham Cruzvillegas, of Purepecha origin, develops, through installations made of combinations of recovered urban and industrial waste, a work that addresses the social experiences of creation, transforma-tion and subversion, from the edges of the city and from beyond State control. Through the visual analysis of a group of works by this artist, this essay exam-ines the role of sculptures and installations as theoretical and critical devices of forms of life that, with their ingenuity and effort, persist in overpopulated and segregated urban environments. The essay concludes that Cruzvillegas’ objects and installations provide urban anthropology with a critical register, as while they denounce conditions of misery and inequality, they work in a dual approach: 1) as condensed experiences, through which a reflexivity about the forms produced by human activities is deployed, and 2) as images whose materialities and architectures reveal the paradoxical interplay, which between precariousness and creativity, develop forms of life on the urban margins.