Building 88 in the Zacamil sector of San Salvador now has something no other building in the world can claim to have: a 13-metre Gioconda made of plastic lids. Óscar Olivares, a Venezuelan artist born in 1996, announced on 20 February the completion of the project, which had been under construction for several days and involved waste pickers, volunteers and local organisations from its earliest stages.
The central figure in the mural is not exactly Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa. Olivares reinterpreted her as a woman with a dark complexion, curly hair and expressive eyes, dressed in the colours of the Salvadoran flag. The artist calls her the Salvadoran Mona Lisa, although he clarifies that she does not represent anyone in particular. For him, she embodies any ordinary citizen, because the renaissance of El Salvador and Latin America, he says, is in ordinary people.
The lids used in the work were collected by residents of Zacamil and recyclers linked to the National Association of Collectors and Recyclers of El Salvador (ASONARES). The project was also supported by the Custom Made Stories Foundation and the company Full Painting. Olivares used the pieces in their original colour, without painting them, making the selection and classification of the material part of the creative process.
Urban art with museum ambitions
Zacamil is not the first place where Olivares left an intervention of this kind, but it is the place where he left the largest. The muralist has been developing large-format works with reused plastics in different countries for years. His first emblematic project in this format was the Oko-Mural, carried out in 2020 in El Hatillo, Caracas, which laid the foundations for a proposal that has since travelled to at least six countries, including Mexico, Italy, Panama, France and Saudi Arabia.
His work is present in nearly 22 countries and has been exhibited at fairs and events such as ArtExpo New York. He has received awards such as the Ibero-American Award for Online Entrepreneurship in 2015 and the Golden Mara Award in 2017. Over time, his work has also crossed over to Europe, with projects in cities such as Madrid and Pescara.
In Zacamil, El Salvador, the artist sees more than just a finished mural. For him, the area is on its way to becoming an open-air museum, and this work is one more piece in that transformation. Community participation was not an anecdotal detail: at every stage of the process, neighbours and local institutions played an active role, something Olivares describes as an essential part of his working method and not just a symbolic gesture.
