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.
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