Territory, culture, and community Pasaporte Cultural is a project that maps independent cultural spaces across Mexico with the aim of making visible, strengthening, and creating connections between initiatives that operate outside government programs, yet have a real impact on their communities.
The project begins with a fundamental question: what is a cultural space? From this reflection, the mapping brings together a wide range of places from community boxing centers and theater venues to painting workshops or film screening spaces as long as they are rooted in a territory and connected to an active community.
This second mapping marks a key moment for Pasaporte Cultural, as the research moves beyond the digital realm and takes physical form for the first time in a book. The publication organizes interviews, data, and stories into thematic chapters that reflect on the origins, organization, challenges, and shared learnings of the cultural spaces documented.
The book’s design faced the budgetary and production constraints typical of a self-managed project, which we turned into an opportunity to define a visual proposal that is clear, honest, and aligned with the core of Pasaporte Cultural. These conditions led us to use cardboard as the main material for the book’s cover, without a dust jacket. The biggest challenge was printing using only two inks, which we embraced as a creative constraint and a space for play. The chosen colors. A vibrant pink and a blue. Mix to produce a third tone, purple, expanding the project’s visual language.
The dust jacket is one of the most important elements of the book. Through illustration, each state in the country is represented equally, avoiding hierarchies and reinforcing the idea of a decentralized territory. More than a traditional map, it functions as a metaphor for community, where all cultural spaces carry the same weight and are part of a single network.