Liliana García – On the Same Level

Artist Liliana García has been awarded the Creation Grant from the Medellín Mayor’s Office for her sculptural project On the Same Level. Focused on pedestrian mobility and urban accessibility, the project involves creating a modified mobility device—inspired by a wheelchair—along with public walks involving various communities and participatory workshops about the body and space. Through these actions, García aims to provoke critical reflection on the physical and symbolic barriers that shape how we move through the city.

What would it feel like to walk through a city if your body didn’t conform to the standard expected by urban design? That is the core question behind On the Same Level, an installation that reflects on public space access from the perspective of functional diversity. With an immersive and challenging structure, the work invites us to rethink how cities are built—and who gets to navigate them freely.

The installation draws from three key components of urban mobility: sidewalks, tactile paving, and assistive devices. Through these elements, the project creates an experience that confronts each visitor with the physical and social barriers that limit free movement.

Field Research

On the Same Level emerged from a long process of observation and fieldwork that began in 2019 across various towns in Antioquia, and expanded in 2022 during an academic residency in Medellín. Inspired by urbanist Jan Gehl’s ideas, García walked specific sections of public space, documenting in video the interruption points or hazards along sidewalks: steep ramps, poorly installed tiles, unnecessary obstacles, and routes that are impossible to traverse independently.

This material became a critical cartography of the city’s accessibility. What appears to be neutral design often reveals deep structural exclusion. Pedestrian routes are not always made for everyone—they often replicate a singular model of the body and movement.

Sculpture, Architecture, and Activism

The installation spans approximately 90 square meters and blends sculpture with experimental architecture. One of its core components is a 10-meter-long prefabricated concrete sidewalk. Though it mimics standard urban design, it introduces intentional irregularities: sudden drops, extreme slopes, and handrails that hinder rather than help movement. The result is a fragmented path that forces viewers to constantly alter their route.

Surrounding this central structure are 1,500 tactile tiles, deliberately altering the conventional forms used as visual impairment aids. These geometric distortions challenge the assumption that cities are designed for everyone, revealing inconsistencies between normative intentions and lived realities.

 Devices to Shift Perspective

Among the project’s most striking elements are two metal devices inspired by wheelchairs, but designed for people without mobility impairments. The intention is to make the user’s body feel bigger, clumsier, and more dependent on the environment.

These devices are not meant to be functional tools but rather exercises in embodied empathy. They aim to break the comfort of the normative body and open a conversation about the relationship between body, space, and exclusion.

Art and Spatial Activism

On the Same Level is a critical statement on urban design and its structural failings. From an ethical standpoint, it challenges the notion that limitations reside in the body, instead framing them as the product of poorly planned environments.

Drawing from thinkers like Agustina Palacios and Javier Romañach—who argue that disability is not an individual failure but a social construct—the work invites a change in perspective. Rather than adapting people to the world, it suggests that the world should adapt to human diversity.

 An Invitation to Rethink Urban Design

According to the most recent disability census conducted by DANE in 2010, over 2 million people in Colombia live with some form of disability—more than 400,000 of them with motor impairments. For many, walking freely through the city is not a real option, but a denied privilege.

This work stages an uncomfortable truth: that mobility, autonomy, and access are not guaranteed for all. Acknowledging this inequality is the first step toward changing it.

A Work That Speaks to Everyone

Liliana García (Medellín, 1977) creates work that interrogates the body, architecture, and society. Her practice offers a critical yet constructive perspective on both urban and domestic environments, calling attention to often-overlooked flaws in contemporary functional design.

The questions she raises are both simple and urgent: Who gets to move freely? Who can use a given object? How do we experience the world from other bodies? What designs are truly universal?

By reimagining everyday objects and urban space through active sculpture, García highlights the urgent need to transform our environments—so that accessibility, functional diversity, and autonomy become real, tangible, and sustainable for all.