Where municipalities do not do their job, Jim Bachor intervenes to cover the crevices with imagination. He is known for creating various mosaics of flowers or ice cream of all kinds – cornets, sherbets, ice creams. But everything changed five years ago in the streets of Chicago. After a very harsh winter, the streets of the city were severely damaged, leaving hundreds of potholes. So he came with an idea, inspired by the mosaics in Ravenna (Italy) in the early 2000s: since no one is busy repairing crevasses and potholes on the roads of his city, why not do it himself, with his own means, and let his imagination speak.
Since then, the artist has not been idle… and has not really been more confined to frozen desserts. As evidenced by his Instagram account, he has expanded the boundaries of his art to other dishes and food products of everyday life: fruits and vegetables, instant ramen sachets, meat pieces, sandwiches, and many others… He also expanded his ‘pothole project’ to other cities, beyond Chicago: Los Angeles, Detroit, Nashville, San Antonio or Philadelphia.
Thanks to his traffic cones and his orange construction suit, similar to the employees of the city of Chicago in charge of road reconstruction, Bachor has never been arrested by the police. In 2014, however, the city council of Chicago tried to clear things up through a statement for the Chicago Tribune. Although the city administration appreciated the spirit of the initiative, the council asked the artist to leave this work to the professionals. This warning doesn’t seem to slow him down though.
