Here’s another interesting mural by Portuguese artist Add Fuel painted for this year’s Muraliza Street Art festival in the beautiful city of Cascais.
Add Fuel once again reinterprets and inserts the traditional Portuguese azulejo in his work, not only with a desire to identify himself as Portuguese, but also to reflect about the significance of tradition, what it means for us and how we can preserve it in a fast paced and technologically advanced modern world.
The new mural was painted in the Torre neighbourhood, built in the 1960’s and originally designed as a suburb to relocate fishermen and their families that inhabited the center of the village. Today it has more than 30 buildings, but many of it’s original inhabitants and families still live there.
According to Add Fuel, the fishermen wives or “varinas” used to sell fresh fish brought home by their husbands there. The new piece makes therefore allusion, not only to these women, but also an old and unfortunately dying Portuguese tradition.
“Shortly after I started this mural, I was told that on this exact same wall, forty something years ago there was a varina called Helena that sold fish right there, in front of this wall. Happy coincidences.” Indeed.
Images © Miguel Castro Oliveira
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