This content was published on May 16, 2022 – 17:42
Quito, May 16 (EFE) .- A mural by the Spanish artist Okuda San Miguel has attracted all eyes since Monday to those who pass through one of the main boulevards of the historic center of Quito, where they find an explosion of color that marks the beginning of an urban art route in the capital of Ecuador.
This intervention by Okuda is the first stone of the CaminArte project, an initiative of the Municipality of Quito for the recovery of urban heritage that proposes to create an open-air art gallery, and to which the Embassy of Spain contributes with a series of murals that will be made throughout the year.
These murals, a cultural contribution from Spain to the city on the occasion of the commemoration of the bicentennial of the Battle of Pichincha, will be distributed along the 24 de Mayo Boulevard, as part of the rehabilitation towards the Cima de la Libertad, where it was sealed. the independence of Ecuador.
On the facade of an old cinema, the work of Okuda, known for his artistic pieces with figures of multicolored geometric patterns, pays tribute to the women embroiderers of the Quito commune of Llano Grande, of the Calderón parish, whose embroideries have been declared heritage national culture of Ecuador.
The mural, also made with the collaboration of the Contemporary Art Forum (CEMFAC) of the Llanos de Aridane, a municipality on the Canary Island of La Palma, presents three women embroiderers, one of them in the foreground to which Okuda has added his particular touch with a Pikachu-shaped hat.
DANCE PERFORMANCE
In the inauguration act of the mural, the Spanish dancer Elías Aguirre presented a choreography together with the National Dance Company, with which he worked last week and gave his workshop “Moving pause”.
The presentation of the work was attended by authorities such as the mayor of Quito, Santiago Guarderas; the ambassador of Spain in Ecuador, Elena Madrazo; the ambassador of the European Union in Ecuador, Charles-Michel Geurts, and the councilor for Culture of the Municipality of Los Llanos de Aridane, María Rosario González.
Guarderas welcomed the fact that his city has a work by Okuda, “one of the greatest exhibitors of plastic art, inspired by the women embroiderers of Calderón, a parish in Quito that possesses a series of intangible heritages that enrich and make the culture of the Quiteños and Quiteñas”.
MUTUAL INTERACTION
“It’s not about coming and painting a mural or dancing, it’s about interacting with the people who welcome us and for whom we want to work,” and thus “artists have been able to better understand Ecuador and have made it possible for Ecuador to have a little piece of Spain”, expressed the Spanish ambassador.
Madrazo celebrated the recovery of public spaces for citizens and recalled that the mural “is a gift from the Embassy and from the island of La Palma to the citizens of Quito”, because “Okuda has planted a flag of freedom, which is certainly the only flag with which we can all feel identified”.
For his part, González hoped that the internationalization of culture would be the way in which peoples can interconnect and maintain a cultural dialogue, and in that sense he recalled that this is the third work of a CEMFAC artist abroad, after that of Boa Mistura in Mozambique and that of Sara Fratini in Martinique. EFE
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