From Devastation to Harmony: Restoring Balance, Rekindling Hope
2024 Street Wise Mural Festival
Location: Fence of Groundworks Art Lab, 3750 Canfield St Boulder, CO 80301
Photos by Dona and Niko Laurita, and Dittlo Digital
In From Devastation to Harmony: Restoring Balance, Rekindling Hope, Apitatán paints an expansive mural that visualizes the unbalanced relationship between humanity and Mother Nature.
Pachamama appears as a life-giving force on the left side of the mural. She holds her hands out in generosity, offering abundant water and the Columbine flower. The artist gives her the face of an Arapaho woman and adorns her attire with human skulls to represent the deaths on these lands caused by colonization.
She reveals the paths that humanity might take based on how we treat our relationship to the rest of the living world. Her right hand leads to a path of destruction. Apitatán fills the scene with a cityscape in the distance complete with factories releasing toxic pollutants into the air and mining operations pulling fossil fuels from the earth and dumping waste into the waterways. Fires rage outside the city caused by the expansion of urban areas and the warming of our planet. An eagle soars above the hellscape. Often symbolizing strength, and courage, the eagle here represents the voice of protest rising up to end this reality as it flies from a megaphone.
From Pachamama’s left hand sprouts a different future. This path leads to a lush earth full of diversity of color, animals, and peoples, revealing how humanity living harmoniously with all living things creates equilibrium. A forest thrives, and if you look closely, the tree trunks resemble the shape of the human body, making up a family in total connection with nature. Bright yellow sunflowers, purple irises, and a variety of Colorado wildflowers color the forest meadow. Local fauna like buffalo, elk, and wolves return to inhabit these lands.
Spirits of the ancestors of this land serve as guardians, their presence wrapped up in the mountains and skies. The ancestors wear feathered headdresses similar to those worn by the Cheyenne, Arapaho, and Ute, on whose ancestral lands the city of Boulder sits. Apitatán adds extra wood paneling to the top of the fence to extend his mural and to emphasize key elements like the eagle, Pachamama, and the land’s Indigenous peoples.
Apitatán completed this mural project over the course of eight days. The design process involved CU Boulder CMCI Students. The concept evolved as Apitatán learned more about Colorado and its history. The Ecuadorian artist was thrilled to leave his colorful mark on Boulder during #SWMF2024.
About the Artist:
Apitatán, also known as Juan Sebastián Aguirre Ríos (Quito, Ecuador, 1987), is a visual creator who seeks to reflect roots of the identity of the Latin-American collective memory. The artist focuses on personifying the most significant aspects of the past, reconfiguring the contemporary inherited model, with a personal touch which brings essence, authenticity, and uniqueness.
Amongst his sketches he collects anecdotes, clippings of his memories, and conversations overheard as he walks through life. The scenes he interprets in his paintings mirror a critical view of culture in Ecuador and Latin America in conjunction to sharp geometric features he finds in the mixture of cultures across the continent.
Antiheroes, deities, ancestral warriors, popular characters, legendary shamans, mythical animals, and everyday beings: they all inhabit the artist’s parallel universe. They come alive to transmit their wisdom, memories, fortitude, and humor to defy stereotypical aesthetics. They confirm that true value lies in diversity and imperfection.
Their presence transforms forgotten urban spaces into mirrors that remind passersby of where we come from, questioning who we are. Sometimes they teach us to laugh at ourselves allowing us to get to know who we are on a deeper level.
Apitatán leaves color trails wherever he goes, narrating his personal visions painting murals in several corners of Latin America, USA and Europe. Their purpose is to claim the significance of Latin-American roots and to pay tribute to the greatness of simplicity.