By Ricardo Quezda.
Photos Gabriel McCormick, Eddgar Torres and Yoshi Travel.
Intercultural Festival of Urban Art begins in the city of Queretaro from March 27 to April 15.
If, at this early age of the 21st century, we could speak of a predominant artistic trend in the world, that would be urban art. The movement of monumental plastic art, which takes its influences from muralism, graffiti, public interventions and even from the most astute advertising activations, has made its growth the culmination of a social idea that emanated from the deepest values of humanity when the French Revolution was proclaimed in 1776, making art a universal right to which all people must have access, the brightest edge in the arsenal of democratization and cultural proliferation.
Today, this movement, which although it has its speakers and its detractors, has evolved and found a social niche through its synthesis as a tool that gives voice to the ignored, strongly raises the messages of those concerned and finds its catharsis in the street, where passers-by can be impacted, motivated and in the most benign of inspired and prosecuted cases. Thanks to this last quality, urban art has found a new paradigm, the artivism that summons artists from all over the world to take the walls and walls that make up the panorama of a city to delve into the depths of its social scars and unveil one of the challenges facing its citizens, generating concise messages that allow them to take assertive action before it is too late and from a challenge to a real difficulty for that society to find progress and ensure its survival.
This scheme, of finding the elephants in the room, has given urban art a differentiating capacity among the current trends that predominate in museums because, contrary to contemporary art and its complex and literary statutes, urban art is born of the ramplonería, of the simple, honest and raw of the streets, of the aerosol cans spitting paint on the brushes passed by water and thinner, of the truck singing the song “Panadero con el pan” to the traditional carnivals.
Thanks to this, artivism as a branch of urban art is able to connect with people, improving the neighborhood relationship, making visible the forgotten roots of an oppressed nation or contributing enormously to the preservation of marine life, as Nine Urban Art has done in Querétaro and Estonia through transgrafiti, or Pangea Seed through her artivism in coastal cities around the world. As in its time with muralism, Mexico is positioned as one of the leading exponents of urban art, thanks to various public and private initiatives but above all to the enormous desires and desires of artists, graffiti artists, illustrators, designers and enthusiasts who make up the national scene of urban art. From all of them and for several years Nueve Arte Urbano, whose headquarters are in the city of Querétaro, has managed to establish a viable model for the positive appropriation of urban spaces with collective causes.
After a complex mission to Estonia in 2017, with the transgraphiti festival “Mextonia”, Nueve has returned to the city where it was born and together with Pangea Seed Foundation, one of the main promoters of artivism worldwide, are developing the “Festival Water is One” at the Centro Cultural Manuel Gómez Morín CECEQ in the city of Querétaro, with the specific aim of generating murals that evoke the problems of water today and allow citizens all over the world to take initiative and begin to positively impact their environment.
With the participation of more than 16 national and international artists, the festival intertwines the qualities of transgraphiti and artivism, developing a series of pictorial proposals that make up a meta work of art inside the cylindrical building whose dome holds a Foucault pendulum and which houses the Science and Technology Museum “The Pendulum”. Like the waves that form when a drop breaks the surface of a body of water, the festival seeks to make CECEQ the epicenter of a conscious revolution in the care and management of water resources, in other words, that we citizens waste and pollute less water in our daily activities. With the intention of generating a message that spreads, the festival will concentrate its work on the CECEQ, creating an eye for the hurricane, where they will be painting Aaron Glasson, Curiot Tlapazotl, Demencia, Goal, Jason Botkin, Mantra, Nosego, Paola Delfín, Pogo, Renata, Ryper, Sermob, Smithe y Sänk, with the industrial painters Jorge and Fernando Lucio, from where the series of affluent murals headed by Saul Torbe, Miguel Valiñas, la Xfamilia, Roco Oñate, Lelo y Root Rises.
