The world’s largest mural made entirely of recycled plastic bottle caps has just made its debut in El Salvador.
Coming in at 13 meters high — or about 42.6 feet — the mural depicts a colorful Gioconda, or “Latin Mona Lisa,” and was installed on the side of a building in the Zacamil neighborhood of San Salvador.
The artist behind the piece is Óscar Olivares, a Venezuelan artist born in 1996. The 29-year-old is no stranger to making art out of recycled materials — he has 46 works displayed around the world — but this is his biggest piece yet, made out of over 100,000 plastic bottle caps.
“El Salvador has been a great school that has taught me the great role that art plays in the transformation of a nation,” Olivares shared in an Instagram caption, which has been translated to English.
“But also it has taught me about friendship, teamwork, kindness, and about the light that is in each person, even when darkness surrounds him.”
The mural was installed on Building 88, an apartment building in the Zacamil neighborhood, which is being revitalized from an area once defined by violence.
“In the past, gangs used graffiti and urban art to mark territory,” Olivares told AFP.
Now, it has a different meaning — one that is accessible to the people who live in the neighborhood.
“We’re not experiencing it in a museum,” he added. “We’re experiencing it in a working-class community.”
The art itself depicts something of a renaissance for El Salvador, showing a Latin American woman with dark complexion, curly hair , and dressed in the colors of the Salvadoran flag.
According to EuroNews, Olivares calls the woman “Salvadoran Mona Lisa,” though she does not represent anyone in particular.
“For him, she embodies any ordinary citizen,” EuroNews reported, “because the renaissance of El Salvador and Latin America, he says, is in ordinary people.”
To gather all of the materials required for the piece, residents of Zacamil worked with the National Association of Collectors and Recyclers of El Salvador to collect plastic lids over the course of several months.
The project was funded by Full Painting and Custom Made Stories Foundation, an organization dedicated to revitalizing Zacamil through sustainable, culturally-significant art projects.
The most important thing about the work, Olivares told AFP, is “the impact it has on every viewer and every person who took part,” giving them “a totally different view of plastic waste.”
Although Olivares used the materials in their original colors and did not paint them, it still took months to gather, wash, and sort the caps. The installation itself took about three weeks, as Olivares and his team used a special adhesive to put each bottle cap in place.
“No matter how big the mural is, the gift I'm taking with me is even bigger,” Olivares wrote on Instagram. “The friends, the pets, and so many moments that without leaving, they already fill me with reasons to return. Zacamil … has transcended and will become a model for the world.”
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Header image courtesy of Full Painting/Instagram
