This mural was painted outside a public school with the help of local students, for GAM festival – Graffiti Arte Mural. It is located in the beautiful town of San Cristobal de las Casas, Chiapas, Mexico. 🐆
It was made in February 2020 with vinyl paint, and measures 4 x 10m, collaborating with artist Lelo on the sides.
The portrait is based on a local girl I met while visiting a dance festival in the Tulan Ka’o Caracol – an autonomous Zapatista community from the indigenous Mayan population in Chiapas.
For this series of works entitled beédxe’ (jaguar in Zapotec, balam in Mayan), I was inspired by people from indigenous communities, with whom I shared participatory projects and symbolic searches for local collective memories and identities. 🐆
The jaguar represents the nahual, the human-animal duality, and in a pictorial way also the relationship between the fine art and the illustrative styles. The jaguar is considered a god of earth and nature in many indigenous cultures and somehow I feel very attracted to this figure.
