Written by Sara Baptista de Sousa
The proposal was to pass knowledge and the reality of the younger community to this elder people, which are not accustomed to this specific art universe – design, graffiti and other similar movements. Coworkisboa, in collaboration with Wool – Covilhã Urban Art Festival, created the project Lata 65, that teaches urban art to people with more than 65 years old. A group of elders connected to the Social and Parochial Centre was invited to participate in the workshop, which happen in 12th-16th November 2012.
In that last day, the students presented their work to the public, in a live mural on the Lx Factory Open Day. The idea was to paint outside, but the weather didn’t help, so for the final project of Lata 65, they end up painting a wall in a very important day for Lx Factory – the day where everything is open from 10am to 4am.
Lata 65 made the connection between the seniors population and urban art. The idea appear in a coffee shop conversation, in a partnership between Fernando Mendes, the Coworklisboa space and Lara Seixo Rodrigues – one of the Wool organizers. “Lara had showed me a similar project that she saw in the Internet, K65, and we tought that it would be something cool to do here”. “In three weeks the project was created. We’ve talked to the Parochial Centre of Alcântara, that welcome very well the idea and put together a group”, says the organisation. In the workshop, the seniors learned how to deal with urban art techniques as stencil and graffiti, with known artists in urban art for professors, names such as Miguel Januário (aka Mais Menos), Caos, Kiss my Walls, Tosco (expert in cans) and Adres (expert in stencil).
“Tags were one of the first things that they learned”, says Laura Seixo Rodrigues. “They have all wonderful tags: Mr. Manuel is Balé, his last name; Filomena is Cordo, and Mrs. Luísa is Armando, a tribute to her husband”. This is not the first time that Lara is in a project related to seniors. In one edition of Wool Festival, the older employees of the village factories were photographed for “Inside Out Project”, from the French artist JR. The posters with their portraits were attached in old abandoned factories.
With the average age of the students in the 84 years old, it is very clear that age is only a number. Hortense Pachedo, 81 years old, was the first called to do something with spray in the walls of the corridors of Lx Factory. With her fellow students, and a crowd of other curious people, everyone was with a massive expectation on with she would do and yet, everyone got surprised. With strong will and trust, Hortense got a black spray can and wrote what was on her mind, the word HOT. In the audience, we could hear applauses and laughter, and Hortense gave her the final touch: with another spray can, she contours the letters in yellow, and her first graffiti is ready. “I was going to write my name but it is to big”, she explains later.
Just like her, the other seniors never had even touch a spray can, “I mean, I worked has a mechanic and sometimes I created some sketches in the vehicles”, says and laughs Manuel Balé, with 76 years old and the only male in the group, “but then my boss make me erase it”. As for the project, “it is a good alternative to the routine”, says Manuel Balé, “if I wasn’t here I would be doing cross puzzles or smoking cigarettes”. The participants like it so much that they’ve already ask for a panel to paint.
