Biciminga: Reimagining the move

How a new generation is using pedal power to revive a time-honoured Chilean tradition.

Words by: Sebastián Saldaña Aguilera & Claudio Olivares Medina

Additional editing: Tom Parr

Photos by: Claudio Olivares Medina, Biciminga and Rodolfo Pace (CC BY-SA 3.0)

This article is published in Issue 02 of Carrier, an internationally focused magazine published by the International Cargo Bike Festival.

There is a curious phenomenon visible on the streets of two Chilean cities, Santiago and Valdivia. It’s all down to the efforts of a collective of volunteer cyclists who come together and – drawing on a surprising Chilean tradition – help people to move house using bikes, cargo bikes, trailers, racks and bags.

Biciminga started when friends Seba and Ignacio helped Ignacio`s flatmate move house one Saturday morning during the coronavirus pandemic, using only their cargo bikes. Members of the collective Seba Saldaña and Claudio Olivares Medina take up the story…

Drawing on a Chilean tradition

The local ingredient in Biciminga is the minga, a tradition originating on Chiloé, a large yet sparsely-populated island several hundred kilometres south of Santiago, with its own unique culture. Chiloé is a patchwork of mountains, lush forests, swamps and pasture. The island endures such harsh weather conditions that sometimes houses – that on Chiloé are traditionally made of wood and built on stilts – may need to be relocated from one place to another. Yes, the whole house.

A minga is a community effort in which friends and neighbours come together to do something that would be too difficult for one individual or family to accomplish. And while the word could refer to any number of different endeavours, from harvesting potatoes to building a fence, the most well known type of minga involves moving a house. Using oxen, horses and strong rope, the wooden house is pulled to its new location, rolling it over tree-trunks or on a sled when on land, and floating it on rafts to cross rivers and lakes. When a house reaches its destination, a feast is offered by the homeowners as a thank you to the crew of volunteers, who can number in the hundreds. The term minga means something like, “to exchange sweat for sweat”. So you can imagine that, in our Chilean context, calling our project “Biciminga” was as self-explanatory as it could possibly be.

Impact

Now that we had a concept, it was time to think about how it was actually going to work. At its core, we decided that a Biciminga would be voluntary, non-commercial and accessible to anyone who needed help to move in an economical, low-impact and friendly way. It needed to be open to anyone who wanted to participate in helping others move house with bikes, giving their time and energy and, of course, having fun doing so.

For the house movers, whether they were our friends or complete strangers, our aim was to offer a positive way to approach what is generally a stressful day. Almost everyone has had to move house at some point in their lives. On top of packing up, cleaning and preparing everything for moving day, the actual move is not easy to do on your own, even if your friend with a pickup truck is there to help you. Besides, many people can’t afford to rent an expensive truck or hire in a removal service. So the idea of a swarm of cyclists coming to help with loading, moving and unloading – then sharing a laugh and a meal afterwards – made sense to us.

Sharing the concept

Since the beginning, we have kept an audiovisual record of what we do and how we do it via our Instagram account (@biciminga). Over time, Instagram has become our main channel and we use it to offer our service via contact forms. But perhaps more importantly, it’s how we communicate the Biciminga concept to the world. We’re also keen to help out anyone who reaches out wanting to start their own Biciminga collective; we’ll gladly share our do’s and don’ts.

What we’ve seen is that our concept, a minga with bikes, is really on point. The term Biciminga has even taken on a life of its own, with people outside of our collective using the term on social media when sharing their own house moves. Once, unforgettably, we were doing a move early one Saturday morning when a bystander, clearly still drunk, yelled at our convoy from across the street: “This is the best minga I’ve seen in my life!

Giving back

For many of us, Biciminga started as an excuse to just hang out and try a few ideas – for example, solving the problem of how to move a fridge with only pedal power. However, things have evolved and it is now a common sentiment in the group that our efforts are in fact our way of giving back to the community. The initiative has also raised awareness about the potential use of bikes beyond just personal transportation. What we have demonstrated, in practice, is that cycling is a real alternative to many logistical problems in cities. And of course, we’ve shown that you can have a lot of fun in the process.

—

https://www.instagram.com/biciminga/ 

This article was first published in Carrier, an independent, internationally-focused magazine published by the team behind the International Cargo Bike Festival (ICBF) featuring human-centred stories of people who ride cargo bikes. Issue 02 is out now; to get your copy, visit the ICBF webshop or find an outlet near you.

The 2025 edition of the ICBF takes place in Utrecht on 13-14th October: https://cargobikefestival.com/your-visit/