Parees Festival 2026 Brings Site-Specific Muralism to Oviedo

Posted by Donna on 30th September, 2026
Filed under: From the Street

Parees Festival 2026 has added three new murals to the streets of Oviedo, Asturias, with Maite Rosende, Greta von Richthofen and Mar Herrera creating works shaped by the histories, communities and ecological identities already embedded within each location.

The festival returned to Oviedo following its absence in 2025, extending a public-art programme that has been developing across the Asturian capital since 2017 and which now encompasses works by more than 40 participating artists. The principal 2026 mural programme brought together Rosende, von Richthofen and Herrera at three different sites across the city, supported by a wider programme of workshops, guided walks and participatory activities intended to connect contemporary mural practice with the communities among whom the works will remain.

At a moment when large-scale muralism has become an increasingly familiar element within international cultural programming, Parees offers a more considered proposition. Rather than beginning with an artist’s visual language and searching for a wall capable of accommodating it, the festival works through social research, fieldwork, local knowledge and mediation to identify what a particular location might meaningfully hold.

Parees Festival 2026 and the Evolution of Contextual Muralism

Parees describes its methodology as contextual and situated muralism, an approach developed through the work of the artistic mediation teams Yetooponese and Raposu Roxu, whose research incorporates social mapping, neighbourhood dialogue and the living memory of the areas in which the festival operates. Listening and research into the territory as a preliminary stage in the creation of each mural, allows the works to emerge from local identity rather than simply being positioned within it.

This distinction is increasingly significant within contemporary public art, where the language of the city as an “open-air gallery” has become almost ubiquitous. Murals can unquestionably alter the experience of architecture and introduce ambitious contemporary work into everyday space, yet site-specificity implies something more than adapting an image to the proportions of a façade. It demands an understanding of why an artwork should exist in that particular place and what cultural, historical or social conditions make its presence meaningful.

Parees approaches those questions before the first layers of paint are applied, allowing the artistic process to develop through an exchange between artist and place rather than treating the city as a neutral support.

Maite Rosende Reinterprets Eduardo Úrculo’s La Cometa in Oviedo

For Maite Rosende, born in Donostia in 1991, the commission brings together two strands already central to her practice: the narrative sensibility of illustration and the physical immediacy of working at mural scale. At Parees, that visual language enters into dialogue with Oviedo’s own mural history through her reinterpretation of La Cometa, a work created during the 1980s by the Asturian artist Eduardo Úrculo in the pedestrian tunnel beside Ronda Sur.

Rosende approached the project without a completely predetermined composition, allowing the work to develop directly across the architecture as forms, colour and relationships emerged through the act of painting.

“The process was very interesting, as I started with an initial concept rather than a finished sketch. The elements emerged and were improvised directly on the wall, a way of working that strongly connects with my creative approach.”

The decision to work intuitively gives the mural an especially appropriate relationship with memory, because Rosende is not attempting to freeze La Cometa within a fixed historical image, but to acknowledge its presence while allowing another visual language to evolve from it. In doing so, the site becomes a meeting point between two moments in Oviedo’s mural history, connected less through stylistic imitation than through an awareness of what had occupied the space before.

The public character of the tunnel also became integral to Rosende’s experience of the work, particularly as people who regularly moved through the previously grey passage encountered the transformation while it was taking place.

“In the case of the tunnel, it was wonderful to see how passersby reacted to the transformation and how grateful they were to see colour brought into that space.”

This relationship between artwork and repetition, between a mural and the people who encounter it as part of a daily journey rather than a planned cultural visit, is central to the particular agency of public art, where architecture and image gradually become absorbed into the lived identity of a neighbourhood.

Greta von Richthofen Brings Oviedo’s Sacavera into the Urban Landscape

Working between Munich and Asturias, Greta von Richthofen has developed a practice spanning mural painting and graphic narrative, with public space serving as a recurring site for both image-making and community engagement.

Her large-scale works have appeared across Europe and further afield, including projects in India, Romania, Switzerland, Mexico, France, Germany and Spain, while participatory processes frequently inform the way she responds to place. For Parees 2026, that international experience was focused on something distinctly local: the sacavera d’Uviéu, the fire salamander associated with Oviedo and found among the city’s walls, gardens and green spaces.

The festival’s research for the mural included support from David Álvarez of the University of Oviedo’s Department of Zoology, bringing scientific knowledge into the mediation process and allowing an aspect of local biodiversity to become the conceptual foundation for a monumental public artwork.

Von Richthofen depicts the salamander emerging unexpectedly through the built environment, an encounter that the artist connects explicitly with M. C. Escher’s 1943 lithograph Reptiles.

“My mural depicts an encounter with a sacavera. It emerges from between the floor tiles as if out of nowhere, referencing the lithograph Reptiles by M. C. Escher,” she explains.

In Escher’s image, reptiles appear to move from two-dimensional representation into physical space before returning to the drawing from which they emerged, and von Richthofen uses a related interruption of scale and perception to bring one of Oviedo’s less visible inhabitants into architectural prominence.

“With this piece, I aim to raise visibility for this fire salamander subspecies and spark curiosity about these fascinating residents of the city.”

The mural therefore expands the idea of local identity beyond human history, recognising the city as an ecological environment in which other species occupy spaces that residents may pass every day without noticing. By magnifying the sacavera across a large urban wall, von Richthofen transforms an easily overlooked presence into a subject worthy of sustained attention.

Mar Herrera Recovers the Social Memory of Teatinos

For Mar Herrera, the Parees commission marks her first intervention at this architectural scale, extending a painting practice shaped by sustained study of figuration, colour and material alongside a professional background in Veterinary Medicine.

At Parees 2026, that painterly experience is brought into the public realm through the social and industrial memory of Teatinos, where the festival’s mediation process uncovered recollections of the former slaughterhouse and the Feria de la Ascensión, which formed an important part of neighbourhood life during the 1970s.

Drawing on the memories and anecdotes gathered through the festival’s community mediation process, Herrera reconstructs not a grand historical event but a fleeting scene from everyday life, allowing the mural to hold something of the neighbourhood’s collective memory within the contemporary landscape.

“The mural aims to depict a fleeting moment from the 1970s during the Ascension Fair, which used to take place at the old slaughterhouse located in the neighbourhood,” Herrera explains.

The choice to represent a transient moment rather than a monumental historical event allows the work to operate through the particular texture of collective memory, where the identity of a place is frequently preserved not through official records alone, but through recollections exchanged between families, neighbours and generations.

“These days have been all about sharing stories and anecdotes with local residents, and it is wonderful to leave a small piece of those memories reflected on this wall.”

Herrera’s intervention therefore gives visual form to a history that has survived despite changes to the physical fabric of the neighbourhood, allowing the mural to function as an image of the past while remaining embedded within the contemporary life of Teatinos.

Why Parees Festival’s Site-Specific Approach Matters

Considered together, the three interventions reveal the broader significance of Parees’ approach to contemporary muralism, because each work has been shaped by circumstances that could not simply be reproduced elsewhere without fundamentally altering its meaning. Rosende’s mural enters into a dialogue with an earlier work already embedded within Oviedo’s artistic history, von Richthofen’s intervention emerges from the city’s particular ecological character, while Herrera’s composition is grounded in memories retained by the community around the wall itself.

The mediation programme extends beyond the production of the murals through activities such as Más allá del mural, or Beyond the Mural, which connects audiences with both current and earlier interventions, alongside workshops and family mural projects intended to broaden participation in the festival’s understanding of public space. Parees describes these activities as part of an approach in which community mediation, living memory and respect for neighbourhood context remain integral to the way the festival operates.

Within the wider evolution of international muralism, that methodology offers an important counterpoint to a model increasingly associated with rapid transformation and visual spectacle, demonstrating that ambitious public art does not need to detach itself from the slower processes of research, conversation and cultural interpretation.

The significance of Parees lies precisely in this insistence that site-specificity extends beyond architecture. By treating local history, ecology and social memory as active components of artistic production, the festival positions muralism as a form capable not only of changing how a city looks, but of revealing something about the histories and relationships through which that city understands itself.

Organised by the Fundación Municipal de Cultura del Ayuntamiento de Oviedo. Photo © Fer Alcalá / Aida aka Mirahaciaatras / Parees Festival 2026

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