WOMART by OVNI
Manresa
7.4.2018
On April 7, 2018, the artist OVNI (Anna Taratiel) made a large-format mural on at the Mel street, located in the city of Manresa. In this piece, the artist intended to evoke internal landscapes and propose metaphorical reflections about the environment. This intervention is part of the Womart project, an initiative of Rebobinart that aims to reclaim the need to recognize and make more visible the female talent in the visual arts and promote gender equality in all artistic visual disciplines. The realization of this mural has been promoted by the Xarxa Transversal with the support of the Department of Culture of the Generalitat de Catalunya.
In the video, OVNI explains why she chose that wall: its texture and original features «told a lot of history», with stones from the ninth or tenth century, old render and new brickwork. «You could see it was a wall with many pieces of different lives in it.» A neighbour says it used to be «such a useless stretch of wall».
The video in text (abridged) (translated from Catalan)3 min 42 s
It is as hard to be a professional artist as it is to be a professional woman. Women's position within the art world has its difficulties, partly because there are many things that sometimes hold you back, or make you stop, or make you give up your career.
Within the field I work in, urban art, we are even more of a minority than in art generally. I don't think everything has to be equal everywhere, I don't think every profession has to be 50-50, but at the very least there should be a push, and some appreciation of all the effort women sometimes make to reach a certain level and a position equal to men's.
A very important part of the work we do is this: going to other cities, creating murals and leaving a work or a piece there. I will leave, but in the end this is what stays here. What I also like is being able to experience the neighbourhood and its surroundings a little: I find this location very homely, and over these weeks you get to live the life of the place a little, what happens here, what the people are like, the businesses, daily life. And that is magic.
I chose this wall for its texture —besides the location, which I really like— and for the original features it had, which I found very interesting because they told a lot of history. You could see it was a wall with many pieces of different lives in it: starting from this stone — there were stones from the ninth or tenth century, we were told — and also the render, the layers of older wall and newer wall. It is a bit of a collage of what this neighbourhood is too.
—I think it's fantastic. And what's more, it has made something of this stretch of wall, which was such a useless stretch of wall… And now, my word, with these wonderful backgrounds, I like it very, very much, especially for the old part, which livens the thing up. And let's save walls: these walls looked so sad. The colour looks lovely; it still needs finishing, but you can already see what it is going to be.
Abridged version: direct quotes are kept; repetitions, overlapping speech and passages unrelated to the project are left out.
