Projects
2018 · Querétaro, Mexico
Water is one.
That proposition brought thirty-three artists from Mexico and around the world to the Centro Cultural Manuel Gómez Morín in Querétaro.
Led by Edgar Sánchez and Nuevo Arte Urbano, in partnership with the PangeaSeed Foundation, the project brought nearly 3,000 square metres of painting to the site, including its enormous dome.
Our shared subject connected oceans, rivers, agriculture, cities and the water moving through our own bodies. Each artist approached it through a different visual language.
A common palette helped bring the works together without requiring everyone to paint alike.
The scale demanded considerable coordination: lifts, scaffolding, paint deliveries, volunteers and long days of work. Weather interrupted production, and plans had to change as time grew short.
None of the participating artists received a fee. We contributed our labour to a project sustained by the efforts of organizers, supporters and the people working beside us.
Edgar’s commitment ran through the undertaking. Bringing that many artists together was one task. Helping us complete what we had begun was another.
My first mural brought Saint Francis of Assisi and Quetzalcoatl, the Feathered Serpent, into a shared portrait.
I was working with figures from different traditions, considering what their meeting might suggest about Mexico’s layered cultural inheritance and our relationship with the natural world.
Ancestry, continuity and care for other forms of life became part of that encounter.
Meanwhile, I was dealing with a severe case of Montezuma’s Revenge. By the end of the project, I was nearly ten pounds lighter.
It was a demanding place to be ill.
The second painting grew from conversations with Edgar as weather delays accumulated and schedules tightened.
We began considering the apex of the dome: an opportunity to give the whole structure a final connecting image.
I painted a monumental freehand interpretation of the Aztec Sun Stone, working with ropes, a harness, buckets and brushes, supported by a specialist rappel safety team.
The architecture changed the conditions of painting entirely. The work occupied the top of a structure whose full composition could be seen most clearly from above.
An image at the centre of the project, largely hidden from anyone standing beneath it.
As the paintings approached completion, I remember the atmosphere around the dome.
Copal drifted through the air. Chichimeca dancers moved clockwise around the structure. Volunteers carried supplies while artists worked through exhaustion. Conversations continued into the evening.
A place that had initially presented an almost impossible amount of surface to cover had become somewhere we knew through shared effort.
The separate paintings retained their differences. Around them were the relationships that had allowed them to come together.
What stays with me is how much the project depended on people responding to one another: changing plans, carrying something, sharing knowledge, continuing when someone else needed help.
The subject we had gathered around was present in the way we worked.
Water moves through places we give different names and lives we tend to consider separately. For a time in Querétaro, we organized our efforts around that connection.
Water is one.
Perhaps we are too.
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© Jason Botkin