The project was developed through a series of conversations and collective working sessions, in which the artist, Ruta del Castor’s mediation team and the community shared experiences around labor, dignity, and the ways in which urban life is sustained. Through group dynamics, the process opened a space to name labor conditions that often remain invisible, including the fact that many of these workers do not receive a fixed salary and depend on tips. From this shared experience, the work began to take shape as a question about the visibility of labor, the political force of everyday gestures, and the possibility of transforming a working tool into an instrument of public inscription.

The final action consisted of using the broom, their daily work tool, to write on the ground. In the plaza, participants responded with their brooms to the question: why do you get up every day to go to work? They wrote the names of loved ones, family members, union leaders, values, desires, and collective feelings.

The piece shifts the act of sweeping into another register: no longer as an invisible or repetitive form of labor, but as a form of public inscription. Lists of names in this city’s public space often refer to people who are absent or have disappeared; here, by contrast, the list names people who are alive and present.

Barro: escritura inestable addresses the relationship between labor, language, and labor rights, while activating public space through an ephemeral gesture. Against the monumentality of the Monumento a la Revolución, the piece introduces minimal actions such as sweeping, writing, caring, and naming, opening a reflection on who sustains the city and how art can transform, even if only for a moment, the tools of everyday labor into tools of presence, memory, and collective expression.

Ruta del Castor extends special thanks to the urban sanitation workers of Sector 9 of Mexico City for their generosity, trust, and participation in this project.

“It was a brush in our hands. We wrote what came from our hearts, and for that to become a work of art in the end is wonderful.”

— Alfredo Celis, Sector 9

In 2022, Barro: escritura inestable was acquired by MUAC and is now part of its permanent collection.

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Sector 9 participants:

Jose Luis Acosta, Joel Sánchez, Rosalía Ramírez Santos, Anita Ortiz Piña, Alfonso Romero Flores, Salvador Cruz Cabrera, Cosme Gonzalez, Carlos Alberto Salinas, Jorge Mares Valdivia, Antonio Carreto, Brandon Nalasco, José Luis Cruz Acosta, Joel Sanchez, Erick Nalasco, Emilio Palma, Miguel Sanchez, José Luis Cruz Acosta, Lida Nolasco, Alma Ortiz, Silvia Mendoza, Nallely Ranteria, Claudia Pérez, Maribel Canales, Guadalupe Zavala, Joel Sanchez, Francisco Ortiz Peña, Pablo Xacopinca, Alfredo, Santiago, Faustino Sánchez, Raúl Santiago Chávez, María de la Luz Merino Ramírez, Manuel Alberto Hinojosa, Santiago José Chávez Herrera, Alejandro Xacopinca Xocopa, Luis Aldair Martinez Herrera, Christian Evelyn Reyes, Juan Antonio Morales Mendoza, Alfredo Celis García, among others.

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