Rebobinart in Gran Canaria: who decides what gets painted on the city’s walls?

We travelled to Las Palmas de Gran Canaria with that question and little else. No answer in the suitcase, and that was the plan.

On 10 and 11 September 2026, Las Palmas hosted “The Wall. Arte público y prácticas de gestión”, a series of talks on public art and management practices organised by the Centro de Arte La Regenta with the Canary Islands Government’s Vice-Ministry of Culture and Cultural Heritage. Rebobinart, the organisation that has produced more large-format murals in Catalonia than any other over the past fourteen years, took part on Friday 11, in two voices. Marc Garcia, founder and director, looked back on sixteen years of managing urban art starting from that question. Míriam Alarcón, founder and curator of Womart, spoke about women, urban art and public space.

They did not ask us for a catalogue of pretty murals

La Regenta’s brief went somewhere else. They wanted the part nobody sees: the paperwork, the negotiations, the obstacles that never make it into the photo. Everything that makes public art far more than painting walls.

The talks are the theoretical leg of the ArenArte project, which paints the deteriorated façades of the Arenales neighbourhood, in the centre of Las Palmas, to bring back its identity and open a conversation with residents. The programme was not held in just any auditorium. It took place at the Suárez Naranjo Civic Centre, inside the very neighbourhood where the walls are.

The free-entry programme brought together very different experiences: the Casa Arco Project by artist Capi Cabrera, already completed in Arenales; the CEMFAC in Los Llanos de Aridane, presented by Ricardo Suárez, who has turned the town into a street museum; the community approach of muralist Tono Cruz; the work of Boa Mistura, presented by Javier Serrano Guerra; and the cooperative models of 7H Cooperativa Cultural, with Andrea Barreira Freije.

Urban art has also fallen for the extremism of the single formula

For years the sector has settled into a certainty: there is only one way to do projects, and it is whatever each of us happens to be doing. Contextual art. Democratic art. Art that transforms the territory. Art that builds ecosystems.

Each of them gets something right. Context matters, and so does participation. A project leaving structure behind when it goes, the same. The problem is not the ideas, it is the certainty they are defended with: every label comes with its own handbook and its own list of what is right and what is wrong, and it is paraded with a fervour closer to a political campaign, with slogans, sales pitches and named adversaries, than to an artistic practice.

We have been through all of them. And we came out with an uncomfortable conclusion: none of them stands on its own.

What changes is not the wall, it is the logic

Artistic, free, participatory, advertising, commemorative, protest, educational, ephemeral, heritage, identity, community, institutional, speculative… The same façade takes all those logics, and each one arrives with its own brief, its own money and its own conflict. A wall is not a surface. It is a decision.

We have spent sixteen years contradicting ourselves, and it is the best thing we have done

In Las Palmas we put our whole way of working on the table, without picking what to show. There are the projects we drive ourselves, with financial freedom and no client behind them: they come from a need we spotted on the street and we push them forward because we believe they have to exist. And there is everything commissioned by public administrations, organisations, companies and private individuals. Social, community, educational, institutional, commercial and advertising projects, right down to painting a façade for a brand.

That many walls do not prove us right. They give us the sample book, and enough road behind us to have got it wrong in every possible way.

All of them have contradictions. The free wall that the very institution tolerating it ends up erasing under a coat of grey paint. The community project paid for with a budget line the neighbourhood never asked for. The brand that gives an artist the biggest wall of their life and that, on the same invoice, pays for the social project that cannot pay for itself. The mural one resident applauds and the one next door that another reports, the same morning.

We do not hide it. We explain it, because that is what happens when you work in public space with real stakeholders, each with their own interests.

Womart: making a stand without absolute certainties

Míriam Alarcón spoke about Womart from that same place, that of a project which still does not have all the answers. It was born in 2018 from a figure that hit us while managing walls: 96% of the artists booking a wall on Wallspot were men. The reaction was ten simultaneous interventions in ten cities. Then came the JAMs, the processes with the women of Trinitat Vella and the 8 March mural in Sant Martí, negotiated at four tables at once.

Womart is not a handbook, and Míriam said so clearly: the questions remain open. How to champion women’s talent without being patronising. How to make room for the diversity of identities without reproducing the exclusion we denounce. Today it is no longer a separate project. It is a way of deciding who we call, who we programme and who decides what gets painted.

When you paint in public space you create controversy. Always.

City councils, residents, local organisations, artists, brands, property owners, media, tourists. On the other side, the content, the process, the money, the location, the duration and, above all, who is not in the room. Any combination is a possible conflict. Anyone promising otherwise is selling you what you want to hear.

At Rebobinart we work on all of them. Not for the sake of it: each one serves someone at some point, and if they all have a purpose, they are all equally valid. Declaring one of them the only legitimate one is not an artistic stance. It is deciding that someone else’s way of doing and thinking does not count.

For whoever calls us, this has a practical consequence. We do not turn up with a model to be validated. We ask which wall this is, who pays for it, who lives across the street and who will answer for it when somebody complains. The answer changes the entire project.

And yes, the trap is ours too. A text denouncing absolute certainties ends up proclaiming things with too much confidence. That is why we are not closing it with a formula. Míriam said it about Womart and it holds for everything we do: the questions remain open. We still do not know who decides what gets painted in the city. What we do have is sixteen years of evidence that the job is not to pick one logic and defend it against the rest, but to keep them all alive at once and to keep opening new ones.

“The Wall. Arte público y prácticas de gestión”, 10–11 September 2026, Suárez Naranjo Civic Centre, Las Palmas de Gran Canaria. Organised by the Centro de Arte La Regenta, part of the Government of the Canary Islands, within the ArenArte project. Our thanks to Núria González Gili and Alejandro Vitaubet for the invitation and the welcome.