The man with the infinity sign

Every city's bike scene has a figure the others orbit. In Montevideo it's a VJ.

Pedro Brito del Pino works the city's night circuit under the stage name Luz Mala, but you're more likely to meet him in daylight, beside a purple-and-yellow pedal trike crowned with a speaker and a slowly turning neon infinity sign. That machine is the MusiMóvil, the mobile sound system that has become the soundtrack of Montevideo's group rides — and Brito del Pino is the one pedaling it.

Built, stolen, rebuilt

The MusiMóvil began in August 2020, in the depths of the pandemic, when a loose crew of artists, makers, DJs and mobility companies decided that if culture couldn't happen indoors, it would happen on wheels. They started with bike carts and borrowed speakers. In February 2021 they unveiled their first purpose-built music trike, named «Original».

Two months later it was stolen.

What happened next tells you what the project actually is. Rather than fold, the crew kept the rides going on cargo bikes and borrowed carts — and by September 2021, Montevideo's bike, skate and roller communities had pooled their effort to build a replacement. They called it «Futuro». The neon infinity sign that spins above it today reads, in that light, less like decoration and more like a thesis: this thing doesn't stop.

From wheels to walls

For years the MusiMóvil had no address — it was wherever the ride was. That's what makes Brito del Pino's current project such a turn: Rodala, a warehouse on a pedestrian corner of Ciudad Vieja that he presents as a bid to become Montevideo's first cultural center devoted to active mobility. Skate track, bike workshop, cyclist bar — the itinerant idea, given foundations, recruiting founding members from the scene itself.

The warehouse is under construction and in use at the same time, which seems fitting. Bike polo and parts fairs already fill it once or twice a month; the ambition, as he tells it, is to finish the skate track, open every weekend, and add a weekday bike workshop. The trike, meanwhile, parks at the door on event days and plays the street.

You can meet the project either way: catch the infinity sign rolling past with a crowd behind it, or go to the corner where, more and more often, it stands still.