The Asalto Festival has returned to San Pablo through September 27 with an edition developed after months of conversations with residents, organizations and community groups. That preliminary work has led to interventions connected to care, migration, nature, memory and the neighborhood’s own identity. Some will occupy large facades, while others will be hidden in much more everyday places.
AGUADORES STREET
One of the most visible changes will come to the San Pablo Health Center at 7 Aguadores Street. Brazilian artist Júlia Mota Albuquerque, known as Land of Julia, will transform its exterior facades with a large composition focused on health, care, nature and community.
Before painting, however, she has asked for help from those who use the center every day. Drawings, photographs, words, memories and perceptions contributed by patients, healthcare professionals and San Pablo organizations will inspire the final work. The result will be a colorful facade in which the artist’s distinctive graphic universe will blend with small fragments of neighborhood life.
PREDICADORES STREET
At number 84 Predicadores Street, Galician artist Maz will focus precisely on something residents highlighted during the earlier meetings: the lack of shade and limited presence of nature in certain parts of the neighborhood.
One expression recorded during those conversations neatly sums up the starting point: “lots of concrete, little fun.” From there, Maz will create a mural beside a large paved area used as a parking lot, exploring the relationship between the city, nature and an urban model in which cars occupy a large part of the space.
The doorways on Agustina de Aragón Street will also be filled with color. Photo: Festival Asalto
AGUSTINA DE ARAGÓN AND LAS ARMAS
How can a neighborhood be portrayed without drawing its streets or the faces of those who live there? Argentine artist Nicolás Romero will do so through everyday objects. Before picking up his brushes, he will walk around San Pablo, speak with residents, businesses, community groups and organizations, and collect objects that can tell small stories about work, affection, origins or customs.
With them, he will create two large contemporary still lifes that will be transferred to the walls at 29 Agustina de Aragón and 87 Las Armas. It will be a kind of collective photograph of El Gancho, though without people: the objects its residents choose to share will ultimately tell who lives there. The intervention will take place from September 21 to 27.
ZAMORAY STREET
Perhaps one of the most unusual proposals will be that of Zaragoza artist Estefanía Abad at numbers 8 and 10 Zamoray Street. In this area, some facades still have windows and balconies that are closed or bricked up, traces of buildings that have gradually lost residents over the years.
The photographer will play precisely with that absence. Neighborhood residents will recreate domestic scenes that will be photographed and later placed in those sealed openings. From the street, it will seem as though conversations, games, acts of care and small everyday scenes are once again taking place behind those windows. It is a fiction made, paradoxically, with El Gancho’s own residents.
CASTA ÁLVAREZ AND SACRAMENTO ALLEY
The intersection of Casta Álvarez and Sacramento Alley, near the Las Armas area, will also change in appearance. Ase Torralba, an artist from Jaén who works with geometric shapes, large areas of color and a distinctive pointillist technique using spray paint, will create an intervention there.
The building’s architecture will be part of the work itself. Torralba will use its different planes to make the composition change depending on the position from which it is viewed. From a distance, an overall image will be visible; up close, the thousands of particles and textures that make up the mural will emerge.
AGUSTINA DE ARAGÓN
At 24 Agustina de Aragón Street, another intervention with a story behind it will be created from September 22. Artist Spogo will address so-called migration grief: the losses, emotions, changes and adaptation processes experienced by those who leave their place of origin to begin a new life.
The work will result from several previous sessions with migrants connected to San Pablo. Their experiences will not be represented literally, but transformed into colors, shapes and abstract compositions. The mural will thus be the visible mark of a collective process of listening and creation.
In addition, the vacant lot between Agustina de Aragón and Miguel de Ara will not contain exactly a mural, but it will host one of the festival’s most distinctive proposals: the new Neighborhood Greenhouse. Residents and community groups will imagine what uses this space should have beyond plant care, and their ideas, words and wishes will gradually be written onto the structure itself.
This year, the Asalto Festival will also pass through the doors of several buildings on Agustina de Aragón. Numbers 19, 28, 31, 42 and 44 are taking part in the Doorways Project, with interventions by Christina Healy, Elena Mompó, Ineso, Rocholica and Samuel Adebola.
