Point of Contact Mural,  Santiago de Cuba

January 2011

In January, La Raza Artists were invited on a cultural program to Cuba to spend several weeks in the town of Santiago de Cuba working on a project. Four artists took part, and in this time, they installed a large exhibition of collective paintings and drawings at the Centro Culturale de Artes Plasticas. As well, they designed and painted a 1200 square foot mural.

Artists Gerald Pedros, Brian Saby, Esther Rausenberg and Richard Tetrault were the mural designers. Completing the scaled maquette took three days, and painting the mural, six. Called ‘Punto de Contacto' (‘Point of Contact'), the mural is based on themes that La Raza Artists had begun to explore in a previous exhibition in Merida, Mexico in 2010. It is a visualization of Canada in a tapestry-like format, and presents encounters between landscape, people, animals and other elements as a ‘map' of collective experience of place. The canoe, historically the main means for accessing the Canadian wilderness and opening up the country, floats over a grid of contemporary highway systems. Figures, based on photographs by Esther Rausenberg, of Kokoro Dance, a butoh-based dance troupe in Vancouver, are superimposed on and through the landscape. The animal symbols emerging from the canoe are derived from native imagery, suggesting legends of hunting and trapping. Lastly, the traditional bird of Cuba, called Tocororo, or Guatani, appears on a postage stamp, suggesting the exchange between Cuba and Canada, and this is juxtaposed with a pair of northern ravens. It is located on a prominent wall at a busy intersection of Calle Garzon at the Ferreiro Plaza in Santiago de Cuba.

Assistance on the work of the mural came from artists from Taller Cultural de Santiago, under the director, and our host for this project, Israel Tamayo. This group was made up of Mauricio Reyes, Juan Salazar, Joaquin Bolivar, Lisbet Ballart, Oniel Leroux, Danisbel Abad, Oandri Tejeiro, Eider Garbey and Lianne Hernandez.

Present at the inauguration of the mural was Heather Deal, Vancouver City Councilor, who along with the Minister of the Interior of Cuba, and Israel Tamayo, director of Taller Cultural, talked about the value of this sort of exchange between countries and of the benefits both to artists as well as to the public.

Images