Projects
2014 · Holbox Island, Mexico
Holbox was my first significant international mural festival, and my first major colour collaboration outside EN MASSE.
Fishing boats lined the shore, sandy roads crossed the island, and daily life moved at a pace I was happy to join.
I had come to paint through the Festival Internacional de Arte Público, IPAF. Rather than expecting artists to arrive with finished concepts, the festival made room for us to spend time with people and get to know the place before deciding what to put on its walls. This is the mark of an event serious about regenerative cultural ecosystems.
Much of that experience unfolded through my friendship with cultural researcher and writer Claudio Obregón.
We travelled through small villages where Maya was spoken daily, talking about cosmology, philosophy, symbolism and history. Through those conversations, places I might otherwise have passed through began to hold stories and relationships I could not have encountered simply by looking.
Claudio gave generously of his time and knowledge. What we discussed stayed with me as I began to paint.
I was collaborating with Curiot, whose work I had admired for years before we met.
Shortly before production, we sat on the beach with our sketchbooks, exchanging drawings, ideas and fragments of imagery. We had no finished design. Eventually, a simple framework emerged:
He on one side of the dome, I the other.
Meet in the middle.
It left plenty unresolved. We would have to find our way through those parts while painting.
Our surface was a large concrete acoustic shell in Holbox’s central plaza.
The work meant long days on challenging scaffolding, exposed to heat, wind and salt air. By the end, I was badly sunburned and exhausted.
I also remember the walks to the site, conversations over breakfast and dinner, and watching our separate approaches begin to connect across the concrete.
As the painting developed, Claudio recognized references to things we had discussed in the preceding days. Some were deliberate. Others had found their way into the work without my planning them.
That was one of the pleasures of the process: discovering what I had carried into the painting, sometimes through someone else pointing it out.
Several relationships that became important to my life and work began on Holbox.
I met Trey Packard there, beginning a connection that would lead to years of collaboration through SeaWalls. I also met Edgar Sánchez, whose generosity would support future projects including Agua Es Una in Querétaro and Love Letters to the Great Lakes in Toronto.
Paty Linage, an arts administrator and educator based in Cancún, and Enriqueta Arias, a Mexico City-based arts administrator with Artsynonym, also became longstanding collaborators. Over the following years, we worked together extensively on SeaWalls activations and smaller public art productions throughout the Yucatán.
The mural did not last long against the island’s weather.
The relationships continued. Years later, I can still follow paths back to that first visit — to Claudio’s company, to the people I met, and to sitting on a beach with Curiot, agreeing to meet in the middle.
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© Jason Botkin