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Salamanca (EFE).- Floral art, street theatre, routes and pinball will accompany the 17 urban art creators this Saturday who paint the walls of the Barrio del Oeste in Salamanca at the Galería Urbana festival, an example of citizen transformation and an alternative tourist destination in This city declared a World Heritage Site.
This neighborhood, so similar to other working-class neighborhoods in Spain, began to mutate in 2013, when a neighborhood initiative proposed turning garage doors, facades, and gable ends into canvases for the best urban art.
The festival already has twelve editions this year and leaves more than 200 works by renowned creators such as Ricardo Cavolo, Catalina Medarde, Diego AS, Alice Pasquini and Felipe Piñuela, among others.
The main guest artist of 2023 is Iván Floro, the painter of the iconic cover of the album “El Madrileño” by C. Tangana, who “parks” a large Honda CBR forever on Palacio Valdés street with its nods to impressionism and the aesthetics of the nineties.
Floro, 29, has been painting since early Friday in the black overalls with fuchsia pink letters of the ZOES neighborhood association, the maker of this civic milestone that is the transformation of a neighborhood into a point of reference for visits to Salamanca.
The ZOES headquarters hosts dozens of recreational and cultural activities for the residents of the neighborhood, among which are also numerous students due to its proximity to the campus, the bus station and the center.
The streets of this extensive neighborhood require you to walk attentively because they are populated with artistic interventions: Felipe Piñuela’s giant pencils cross the façade of a school and other types of cheers honor women who fight for their rights and those who care for “dependent people”. without help”.
intergenerational meeting
The activities that accompany the Urban Gallery summon children, young people and adults in the streets and squares of the neighborhood, because ZOES has the vocation of maintaining the community fabric that has always been a hallmark of neighborhoods like this one.
Urban art greatly attracts the groups of foreign students that abound in the Salamanca university. One of the latest signings of the association is Juliette Dupêcher, a young Erasmus student who on Friday organized “El oeste teje”, a meeting to share the crochet tradition between generations.
The Barrio del Oeste suffers from a demographic seasonality that is very characteristic of Salamanca: it acts as a “dormitory” for numerous students during the course but in June the stampede begins in cars and vans carrying suitcases and backpacks that will not return until September.
Floral art to reclaim a greener neighborhood
Urban art turned the walls of this neighborhood, once full of graffiti, into the target of the mobile cameras of more and more local and foreign visitors.
Now ZOES seeks to do the same with floral art: take advantage of the Urban Gallery to fill the street with these creations as a claim to the neighborhood they want, because not everything is done: a greener neighborhood, friendlier for people, for walking and for tour it by bike. EFE