The Art in Action Wall in Biarritz is the result of a group art project led by Olga Luna, a Peruvian artist living in Paris, who brought together a hundred people from four different associations: the inner-city youth association Denekin, the Mouriscot leisure centre, the youth residence in Castillon near Tarnos and the Valentin Haüy Association. Olga Luna’s prolific artistic career includes other mask walls across Latin America and France, but this is the first time she has worked with partially-sighted and blind people. In 2002, she co-ordinated an Art in Action Wall in Peru with children living on the streets of Lima and in the Magdalena residence, with financial assistance from Sweden via the NGO “Generación, instituto de investigación, promoción y comunicación social”, a non-profit-making organisation dedicated to defending children’s rights. The following year, in 2003, Olga Luna lead an identical project in Buenos Aires, Argentina, with one hundred 15-19 year-olds from the Almirante Brown district, all with difficult backgrounds. In 2004-2005, it was in Sao Paulo, Brazil, that she worked on a new mask wall with young residents of the association called “Associação Beneficiente Santa Fé”.
The Art in Action Wall is an interactive project involving people from underprivileged backgrounds with no previous artistic experience on an entirely voluntary basis. Thus, every day, Olga Luna brings together 10 to 20 budding artists. They each choose the person whose face they will use to make their mask; they then cover the exposed facial area with an oily layer before pouring quick-drying plaster (three minutes) onto it, in Olga’s presence. This creates the mask’s “negative”. Then, without her aid, the apprentice applies a layer of clay to the inside of the plaster mould, not forgetting to make an opening for each nostril. This “positive” version must subsequently be waterproofed, as must the wooden box into which it will be placed, the inside walls of which are painted in a colour reminiscent of flesh and clay. Having poured plaster into the bottom of the wooden box, the apprentice, once again in Olga’s presence, places the clay mask in the box, fixing it in the plaster. The “positive” version and the base of the box are then given a coat of glue and sprinkled with Rhune stone powder. Lastly, he/she makes holes for the eyes with a drill and inserts a glass bead in each.
The novelty of Olga Luna’s work lies in bringing together art and life for the time it takes to create these Art in Action walls. This basic, much-needed rapprochement is of the utmost importance for the young and adults living in severely deprived social, economic and cultural conditions, in particular those sections of the population who survive as best they can in the numerous underdeveloped metropolitan districts of Latin America and Europe. Olga Luna provides the opportunity for them to become involved, both personally and as part of a group, in an artistic project that transforms them into creators of a work of art, itself the symbol of an ideal society in which art fully performs its political role, in other words where art acts as an introduction on the road to fulfilment and self-realisation, and to the making of a more just society.
Jean-François Larralde
September 2005