Artist statement
Anonymous heroes is a project from the artist Joan Aguiló and the playwright and actress Catalina Inès Florit. Usual coworkers, and islanders, base their work on the research of local identity and the importance of the individuals within a society.
As majorcans, islanders from probably one of the most gentrificated and touristic places in Europe, we started to develop strong needs to know more about our culture and our essence in our personal lifes, to know what remains from majorcan society in a daily base as citizens; and the same needs and feelings started to appear too in our professional artistic life, walking a conscious way of delicacy and respect towards the identity to put in value who we are as a society, and be proud and conscious about it.
For that, Joan started to develop it in the way of street Art, to make it public to all, with drawings that are usually characters, real and anonymous people from whom he steals an instant of their quotidian lives. A style that could define the Mediterranean way of life, with the thoughts and traditions of a society. And Catalina, in playwright projects based in anthropology, involving community (usually in interviews form), and specially focused in the silenced groups from a society, with special attention in women and old people.
For both of us, then, was a basic that the Art was accessible and involving society in all the possible layers.
Through Anonymous heroes we found a confluence and a passion: to catch the essence of a place, discovering that through the characteristics of their residents. It wants, especially, to give visibility to the anonymous persons that create a non-material richness for the place where they are living, and to help developing a feeling of proudness to the place. Thanks to it, new links between the resident and the environment are created, spaces in bad conditions are reinhabited and the local culture is fomented.
Because our main item, identity, is so universal and still so important in so many places (not as a patriotism, but as a way of knowing and put in value our community), quickly we were able to cross the border of our own identity, and being able to do the same work with other identities: to search the beauty that includes every landscape and society and contributing to respect it.