Paper short abstract:

This paper examines Medellin’s fitness practices and infrastructures in relation to specific local contexts. It focuses on the ways grassroots construction of fitness spaces and working-out in Medellin constitute the material production of optimism and agency, hewn in concrete and muscle.

Paper long abstract:

Whilst seeded in Europe and North America, modern “fitness” practices and discourses have since taken root in the urban centres of the Global South, where local soils produce different fruit. This paper draws on fifteen months of ethnographic fieldwork in the gyms of Medellin (2022-3), and my interrogation of how fitness interacts with the city’s specific historical, socio-cultural, and political contexts. Here, I will draw on “New Materialist” theory (Coole and Frost 2010), to examine connections between architectural “autoconstruction” and working-out, which become particularly apparent in Medellin’s many grassroots fitness spaces: outdoor “gimnasios urbanos” and improvised “gimnasios barriales”, hewn out of cement and appropriated steel by communities of owner-users. “Autoconstruction” has been used to describe the non-professional “informal” and “pirate” construction of housing in Latin America and, teasing out the connotations of the term, I argue this construction has as much to do with selfhood as it does with housing, and that we should not differentiate between constructions made of brick and those of muscle. I argue that grassroots fitness phenomena in Medellin constitute material practices of optimism, and not only reflect agency but produce it—especially amongst the disenfranchised and emasculated. I explore how entwined carnal-architectural practices reveal the importance of the strong, fit body in Medellin’s colonial history, inhabitants’ celebrated “entrepreneurial spirit”, the peace process, and modes of urban “insurgent citizenship” (Holston 2008). I’ll close by discussing the implications of the state’s efforts to formalise and control urban gyms, and the increasing incursion of multinational chains into popular neighbourhoods.