Basketball is revered as almost a religion in the Philippines. When this tenement in the Metro Manila area was built in the 1960s, the residents banded together to build their own basketball court.
Surrounded by cramped apartments on all sides, the Tenement court could be claustrophobic, if not for the work of the Tenement Visual Artists collective, which paint and repaint larger-than-life murals on it.
LeBron James, Jordan Clarkson and other famous players have visited the now-iconic court, which made the news in early 2020 after it became a memorial to Kobe Bryant — who was extremely popular in the country — and his daughter Gianna. On the one-year anniversary of Bryant’s death, the community added a second memorial to the original one.
