May (and June and July) Mural Madness

Word of the Day:  

Tapa- cap, like a bottlecap from a soda bottle

What can you do with about $30, a lot of spare time and a lot of help? Make a tapa mural! Or 3. 

This ambitious project was the brainchild of my sitemate Christina Palazzolo: make a bottlecap mural at each of the high schools where we work. It sounded easy enough, just requiring a little concrete, and a lot of trash. The principals and teachers were excited about the idea of having something to beautify their schools at a low cost. Nevertheless, the process has been less than straight forward; we would hold a contest to see which grades could collect the most bottlecaps and create the best designs for their school's mural. However, the kids at the schools showed varying degrees of interest in the project, some being very enthusiastic about creating mural designs and collecting bottlecaps and others being entirely apathetic. At one school, the only design submited was a picture of Bob Marley, which, while very awesome, was deemed inappropriate.

Once the mural process got underway, the kids have been more interested in helping, particularly the students in my English club, who begged me to let them go look for tapas instead of having class and who have spent some of their days or afternoons off helping out. 

This project has been really meaningful for me. There are too few opportunities for kids to work on art projects here, and it has been amazing to engage students who aren't usually interested in class, but like to draw or work in hands on ways. There's also a lot of symbolism in the murals as well: they take so many of the things that ail the community: drunkeness (cheap sugarcane alcohol bottlecaps), trash, diabetes (soft drinks) and turn them into art.The rampant consumerism of Coca Cola and other companies is recast as national symbols, school symbols, arte alusiva a la naturaleza (nature images), etc. Arguably this could be seen as reifying the new kinds of consumption, but I choose the opposite interpretation.

We're mostly done with 1 mural, 1/2 way done with another, and hoping to start with a third next week. Here are some images of the process so far!

 Day 1

 Que bonito: a human sized guardabarranco, the national bird

 Kleydy, expert in mural design

 Sitemates in action

 In process, all three symbols almost there...

 Action shot

 An extremely ugly wall at the school in El Tule

 Students help to sort bottlecaps

 So many.

 Students getting into action

 The school symbol

Finishing off the Sacuanjoche, the national flower

All in a good day´s work.