“Painting Community, Singing Diversity” will bring artists and the community together to paint a mural in Coburg later this year. The theme of the mural is recognising and celebrating the importance of diversity.
With support from Moreland City Council, multidisciplinary artist Katherine Gailer and renowned muralist Lucy Lucy will embark on a journey of collaborative creativity to gather ideas and reflections from people in the area in order to create a design that is a true reflection of the local community’s diversity. Gailer’s work underscores themes that look at the complex relationship between fragility and strength, vulnerability and empowerment. Her passion for art as a vehicle for social cohesion, innovation and empowerment often results in vibrant community art projects. Lucy Lucy is a widely acclaimed muralist, born in Paris, who has graciously carved her niche in the Australian urban art community through large-scale public murals, gallery work, tribal ornaments and bespoke fashion.
Casa Cultura, whose core aim is to harness the power of the arts as a tool for social change, sees this as an opportunity for an enduring mechanism to nurture key attitudes required to overcome cultural barriers such curiosity, openness and respect. Public art, in their opinion, is a highly cost-effective way of shaping consciousness and creating collective attitudes. Advocating for freedom of expression and stimulating spontaneity are at the very core of the social impacts that Casa Cultura was established to help bring about. ‘So many people would think of themselves as “not an artist” but we think they would really benefit from changing their perspective a little bit. To us, art is not about judging output as good or bad. To us it’s an opportunity to express yourself, to understand that your voice is important,’ explains Casa Cultura’s president Eyal Chipkiewicz. To which Gailer adds: ‘Everyone has a story. A different story. Sometimes in our everyday environment we struggle to find the spark to share our marks, but when the spontaneous healing power of art takes over a space, stories begin to fly, to weave a beautiful tapestry with infinite colours, respecting each other’s outlines.’
The inspiration for this project, Gailer explains, comes from a similar experience she led in 2016 in Bogotá, Colombia, in which more than 100 people participated in the collective creation of a mural. The project was turned into a music video by Amaru Tribe’s frontmen Oscar Jimenez, which can be seen at www.youtube.com/watch?v=LFQJh5-DDxo
An online consultation via the Facebook group “Painting Community Singing Diversity” will kick off on September 15, posing playful questions about memory, migration and belonging. The aim of these questions, explains Chipkiewicz, is to “inject some fun into a consultation process that wants to explore what diversity truly means to the local residents and, at the same time, bring them closer to the project so that, when it comes to painting the mural, they feel like they own it as much as anyone else”. The online consultation will be followed by a series of face-to-face workshops in late October, hosted by Lupine Studios, an artistic hub based in Coburg.
After the consultation process is complete, the artists will set off to contrive a design that utilises concepts extracted from the consultations and proceed to sketch these ideas onto the wall, whose Coburg location will be revealed later in the year. The local community will then be invited to contribute to the painting of the mural over the weekend of December 7th and 8th. The mural will be unveiled on International Human Rights Day, Tuesday December 10th
