A Gringa No Brasil

We made a mural! And it was all done with plastic bottle caps!

Since working with the Local Cultural Board on the Traditional Food Festival, I’ve been asked by them to help out with a couple other small projects to promote cultural activities in town. One of these projects was a mural made completely out of bottle caps. The president of the board is a writer and university professor in Tegucigalpa so he has a lot of connections with the art/literature crowd in Honduras. That’s how we got together with Denis Berrios, an artist/muralist in Tegucigalpa that started a non-profit organization called Arte de Barrio. The organization is a group of volunteers that promotes youth development through art projects, especially using recycled materials.

When starting the group, Denis wanted to make the neighborhoods of Teguz more colorful with painted murals everywhere, but quickly realized that finding funding for all of the materials would be really difficult. So instead, he started making murals with bottle caps in a kind of mosaic design. The president of our Cultural Board recruited him to come to Cantarranas to start a mural here and teach a group of kids the process.

The Catholic Church agreed to put the mural on the side of their hall/meeting room that’s just to the right of the church and right on the central park. It’s a great location since a lot of people walk past it every day.

Before even getting started on the mural, we walked around town, collecting as many caps as we could find (just plastic ones since metal would rust). The Catholic community was told about it ahead of time so some of them had already been saving them up for us. There are also a handful of people in town that collect recycling to sell the bottles back, but the recycling companies don’t want the caps so they were able to donate a bunch too.

We started by chipping away the top layer of paint and cement on the wall since the wet cement used to stick the bottle caps on wouldn’t stick well to the paint. Next you trace out the design you want with a crayon. In our case, it’s the image of Jesus looking over the world with a dove flying off to the right. The politically correct American in me wasn’t so thrilled about the design choice, but since it’s on church property and 100% of the people in my town are Christian anyway, I guess it’s all good. Next we applied a layer of wet cement and stuck the bottle caps in it. The caps were all sorted ahead of time so that it was easier to pick out the colors we needed for the design. (Red Coca-Cola caps dominated the rest of the colors.) The background was just a jumble of all the rest. Once a block of bottle caps are all set, you smear the area with more cement to fill in the gaps, let it dry for a few minutes, and then wipe the tops clean so that the colors show through.

Words don't do it justice. Check out the pictures!