The Mexico Pavilion at the 18^th International Architecture Exhibition La Biennale di Venezia 2023, curated by Mariana Botey and APRDELESP, 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 privileged space for poly- and pluri-valent processes of decolonization 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, dedicated entirely to recreation and the promotion of sport, 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.

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