Uno No Escoge

Azilu, Pais Vasco (Basque Country), Spain. 2014

In the summer of 2014, I traveled to Basque Country, Spain for a public art event set in twelve villages of the same municipality near Vitoria-Gastiez. Thirteen artists, from Spain, Latin America and the United States came to paint and share with the local communities, one painter in each village. The village I painted in, Azilu, literally had a population of thirty people. Every village was more or less the same - a small central area surrounded by vast rolling fields of wheat and other types of golden grains.

The event explored the lives of rural women, both historically and specifically of the Basque region. The Basque region has a rich agricultural history and the people of the communities are proud of their land and their history. In choosing a topic for the mural, artists also had the option to consider the modern lives of women in rural communities across the globe today, which is what I chose to do.

My project was a series of five small walls in Azilu’s central plaza. To connect the walls, I used a favorite poem of mine, Uno no Escoge, by Gioconda Belli. The poem takes the viewer wall to wall, where they see women from various parts of the world working the land.