ABSTRACT
Latin American cities have recorded dozens of traffic-related deaths every year of pedestrians and cyclists, mainly due to urban mobility public policies and urban space that privilege motorised vehicles. Activists, artists and relatives of traffic victims have made urban interventions to blow the whistle on traffic violence and propose safer urban mobility designs to nonmotorised commuters. Regarding the cyclists, one of the public interventions has been the embed of ghost bikes—victims’ white bicycles—in the location where the fatalities occurred. The endeavour in this chapter was to scrutinise these ‘motionless vehicles’ from an anthropological perspective, inspired by Gell’s approach. This approach enables us to apprehend the ghost bikes as art objects, behaving like an extension of human beings and influencing urban mobility, urban space and social imagery. Ghost bikes apprehended through anthropological analysis of images and digital cartography revealed a plurality of social relations between humans and nonhumans, fostering ways of sociability, social spaces and urban materialities safer for bicycle commuting. Moreover, art-activist interventions bring out political ways of life (and death) where oeuvre, life and the loss of cyclists’ life are blended. In short, traffic-related deaths became political potency to ensure life.
