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This project has three interrelated components: the development of collective community murals, an aesthetic intervention in public spaces, and a diploma program in mural production. The animators are primarily women between 23-50 years old, middle-class and educated, from various nationalities and of the cultural left. Community participants in the projects are also primarily women, ranging in age from 8 to 65, and including a broad range of people from peasants and workers to professionals. Two UAM professors are developing the 'chaos and utopia' project, promoting a new aesthetic and ethic in public spaces. The diploma participants are primarily young women, from Europe and North America as well as Latin America, who are completing 100 hours of training: five weeks of classes and nine months of field work, producing murals linked to social movements in Canada, Mexico, Salvador, Chile, Argentina and Germany.
These initiatives must grapple with contradictions in their efforts to engage community members in building relationships, securing permIssion and financing of the projects. They may confront resistance from authorities and bureaucrats, and the resources available differ greatly from one country to another. The goals of the project are to build and strengthen interpersonal relationships as well as interinstitutional and international ones, to train participants as animators of a participatory method which will promote community action, and to document the diploma program with photos, videos, etc.
There is a need for deeper theorizing in the field work on the aesthetic and ethical aspects of production, community and popular education. Considerable commitment and work is needed to systematize the information gathered from the experience.
In terms of the creative tensions, the importance of the community process must be reinforced, and not be reduced to emotional excitement around the production process.
The local aesthetic which emerges from the ethic of community participation will reflect the thought, feeling, and action of the community. There is a danger in the process of cultural reclamation and reinvention of falling into superficiality and stereotypes. Nonetheless, the diploma process is contributing to the personal development, self-confidence and commitment of the participants, and is promoting social transformation through interaction within and between communities.
