Parees Festival wrap up its sixth edition, Spain 2022

The Parees Festival has just wrapped up its sixth edition bringing four new murals from national and international artists to Oviedo, Spain, organized by the Municipal Foundation of Culture of Oviedo.

Artists invited by Parees this year included: Taxis (Greece), Samir Toumi (Morocco), Mariana Duarte Santos (Portugal), and the Asturian Nieve Sita.

The festival also held its Muralism Workshop for Families in the Winter Park on Sunday, October 23rd and also in November, it will extend its program with “DiVeRsAs”, a Community Muralism Workshop with users of CenArte, from the Fundación Vinjoy.

The four murals in this edition show Asturian traditions as the hallmark of the festival. The artists, with different styles and cultures, have collaborated with people and groups related to the themes of each work in the mediation processes coordinated by the collective Raposu Roxu.

Taxis, the artistic name of Dimitris Trimintzios, was born in Poland and raised in Greece and has centred his mural on the bicycle as an icon of children’s play, a theme for which the students of the centre contributed with drawings and ideas that Taxis decided to focus on two wheels. One of the façades is dedicated to the tricycle, another to the bike with training wheels, and the last is completed with colourful drawings of handlebars, wheels and saddles. The Museú del Pueblu d’Asturies (Museum of Asturian people) also provide images from their vast archive.

Moroccan artist Samir Toumi has left a mural full of details, in which a family dressed in traditional costume. The image reproduces a living sketch since the Asturian designer Constantino Menéndez dressed a girl and her parents for a photo session that inspired the work. In addition to that composition, the wall is full of details, from the available colours of Samir’s native Sahara, which also fit in with the surrounding buildings, to a phrase by the artist himself: “I am a collection of moments, but everything I have is this instant.“

Portuguese artist Mariana Duarte Santos has finished a mural dedicated to the greengrocers of Fontán and their ancestral trade. The result shows the strength of the gaze of one of the women going to the square every week to sell products from her garden, an image taken in 1968 from the collection of photographer Francisco Ruiz Tilve. During her stay in Oviedo, Mariana met Ruiz Tilve’s family and the greengrocers who maintain this council tradition.

Finally, the Asturian Nieve Sita, the artistic name for Nieves González, has summed up the famous Asturian proverb “Si tien arreglu, s’arreglará. Si nun lu tien, arregláu ta / if it can be fixed, it will be fixed, if it can’t be fixed, then fixed it is”) The two parts of the saying surround two country women sitting on chairs and holding hands.

Muralism Workshop for Families was held, in which thirty girls and boys between the ages of 4 and 12 participated, who painted, together with their fathers and mothers, a wall next to the skate park. On paint stains of different shapes and colours, they had to imagine objects, animals, fruits or whatever else they suggested, resulting in a fun microcosm of original drawings.

In November, “DiVeRsAs” will take place, a Community Muralism Workshop where diverse artistic expressions can be made visible. The activity, also organized by Raposu Roxu is in collaboration with “CenArte “, Center for Normalization through Art. CenArte is part of the Vinjoy Foundation, an Asturian institution for Socioeducational Intervention with People with Intellectual, Psychosocial or Mental Health Problems. The workshop wants to be a collective experience of mural creation, a channel of artistic expression in public space that puts at the centre the voices that generally remain on the periphery of the normative discourse of art.

Photo Credit Mira Hacia Atrás and Fer Alcalá

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