the street is our gallery

Jorge Rodríguez-Gerada creates an astonishing piece of land art in the fields of Estopiñán del Castillo (Huesca, north of Spain) as a moving tribute to the inclusive and integrative work of Fundación Crisálida.

NOURISHING SELF-ESTEEM is an artistic work of an ephemeral nature. This artwork will be created in three phases that utilize the change of the seasons and the change of the colors of a wheat field from April to October 2021. This first phase of the artwork was realised using the green color of the wheat field, the light tan color of the soil and the dark tone of compost, on a plot of land in the rural setting of Estopiñán del Castillo, a small town in Aragón, Spain.

The premises of ‘Nourishing Self-Esteem’ are: the respect for the rural surroundings where the artwork is created and to reflect the reality that manifests itself at a local level in the bakery at Fundación Crisálida – an initiative for integration into the workplace of nine people with intellectual disabilities that coexist and work together making bread, cakes, cupcakes, croissants, panettones and cookies that they distribute in the local area and the region.

WHAT IS THE ARTWORK?

On the ground we see a pair of hands (the small hand of a child and an adult hand) that are coming together. Hands are tools that facilitate and sustain life. They are symbols of the power of creation, of balance between giving and taking, and the potential of all that we can manifest through the action of work.With their hands, people at Fundación Crisálida bakes bread on a daily basis for their town and the towns nearby. Bread transcends cultures and geography, to unify in its simplicity, a fundamental physical and emotional sustenance.

To create a work of art in the countryside, as a homage to the daily tasks of people who belong to a collective minority – at a time when jobs, as well as the countryside, are undervalued and these collective minorities usually do not form part of artistic endeavours – is to lift up an appeal for hope and perform an act that, due to its performative nature, gives symbolic value to creation. By doing so, it celebrates the value of horizontal relationships, recognize the individual input for the good of the community, and allows us to glimpse all that we are capable to achieve when we unify our efforts to make ideas come together that can only be carried out if we forma team.

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Photo credits: Ana Álvarez-Errecalde