Rising Argentine rapper Ecko will make his acting debut in the upcoming HBO Max series Días de Gallos. He shared the good news this week about the project that hits close to home.

Días de Gallos will focus on rappers who come up through freestyle battles.

#estreno
El cantante y compositor argentino, ECKO, una de las estrellas dentro del género del rap y trap latino, salta a la actuación como protagonista de la serie de #HBOMax Max, “Días de Gallos”, que se estrena en junio próximo.@WarnerMedia .@_eckoyg pic.twitter.com/26Aq5rpN52

— Notistarz (@notistarz) February 22, 2021

“This series is a snapshot of the world I come from, the world of freestyle,” Ecko said in a statement. “I am very comfortable telling this story. I am grateful for the opportunity to work with a great cast and production team.”

Like Ecko mentioned, Días de Gallos will be a scripted series showcasing the world of freestyle rap battles. He’s currently shooting the show in Bueno Aires, Argentina, with other confirmed castmates Ángela Torres and Tomás Wicz. Días de Gallos will premiere on HBO Max in June.

Ecko is one of Argentina’s leading trap rappers.

With a Latin trap movement happening within Argentina, Ecko has emerged as one of the country’s leading rap artists. He broke through in 2017 thanks to his hit “Dorado,” which has over 51 million views on YouTube. Ecko later followed that up with “Rebota,” the club banger he shares with other Argentine rappers like KHEA, Seven Kayne, and Iacho.

The 21-year-old artist has been building off that momentum, especially in 2020. Last November, Ecko released his EP Young Golden. For the EP’s lead single, he teamed up with Cazzu, Argentina’s top female trap artist, for the sensual collaboration “Cama Vacia.”

On Young Golden, Ecko collaborated with more of Latin music’s biggest hip-hop acts. He worked with Puerto Rican rapper Brytiago and Dominican singer Amenazzy for “QDLQQ” and Boricua trap pioneer Eladio Carrión in “Baila.”

Read: Trapera Cazzu Pretty Much Confirmed She Had A Relationship With Bad Bunny In A Super Awkward Interview

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Medellín, Colombia was once home to one of the world’s most powerful cartels – Pablo Escobar’s Medellín Cartel. During the ’90s, drug gangs and guerrilla fighters controlled the city’s streets and few people ventured out the relative safety of their immediate neighborhoods.

That Medellín is a distant memory for many Paisas thanks to the fall of the cartels, but also to a distinct set of ideals and values that have shaped the city’s development over the last decade.

Medellín was named the world’s third city of the future and it’s leading in so many categories.

A look at how one city in Colombia is approaching a greener future #Eco #Sustainable #Colombia #Medellin https://t.co/frLoPqqCJf

— HORNi (@HORNi_Rhino) November 25, 2020

Medellín is nestled in a valley high in the Andes, and many of the city’s poorest residents live in comunas they built on the steep slopes. And although the city still struggles with high rates of poverty, city planners are working to bridge the divide between these poor communities with little access to public amenities and the core of Medellín.

The technology that helped save Medellín is not what you’d see in San Francisco, Boston or Singapore—fleets of driverless cars, big tech companies and artificial intelligence. It is about gathering data to make informed decisions on how to deploy technology where it has the most impact. 

Where most smart-city ­initiatives are of, by and, to a large extent, for the already tech-savvy and well-resourced segment of the population, Medellín’s transformation has for the most part been focused on people who have the least.

The city’s cable car system is one out of sci-fi novels.

#Livingtheperipheries Agricultural land on the hillsides above Medellín, seen from the Metrocable designed to link the peripheral communities with the city pic.twitter.com/FbV3j7gq8E

— Heather McCartney (@Heatherjayne96) November 6, 2019

Think of a gondola suspended under a cable, floating high off the ground as it hauls a cabin full of passengers up a long, steep mountain slope. To most people, the image would suggest ski resorts and pricey vacations. To the people who live in the poor mountainside communities once known as favelas at the edges of Medellín, the gondola system is a lifeline, and a powerful symbol of an extraordinary urban transformation led by technology and data.

“The genius of the Metrocable is that it actually serves the poor and integrates them into the city, gives them access to jobs and other opportunities,” says Julio Dávila, a Colombian urban planner at University College London. “Nobody had ever done that before.” As people of all classes started using the cars to visit “bad” neighborhoods, they became invested in their city’s fate, heralding a decade of some of the world’s most innovative urban planning

Designers have created safe spaces for all with parks and libraries.

Medellín proudly presents,the #CitiesForLife platform, #Innovation to shape future of #cities @CitiesFLife @UNHABITAT pic.twitter.com/9JHLS5cVBv

— Project for Public Spaces (@PPS_Placemaking) September 1, 2015

The Metrocable succeeded in connecting Medellín’s poorest neighborhoods to the rest of the city – but where would they hang out? This lead to the construction of five libraries sprinkled throughout Medellín, all surrounded by beautiful greenery. These “library-parks” were among the first safe public spaces many neighborhoods had ever seen. 

The key ingredient of Medellín’s transformation, experts agree, is perspective: The city looked beyond technology as an end in itself. Instead, it found ways to integrate technological and social change into an overall improvement in daily life that was felt in all corners of the city—and especially where improvement was most needed. “Medellín’s vision of itself as a smart city broke from the usual paradigms of hyper-modernization and automation,” says Robert Ng Henao, an economist who heads a smart-city department at the University of Medellín.

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