My conversation with Claudia Salguero, a Colombian Canadian community engaged artist based in Ottawa, where I live on the unceded lands of the Algonquin-Anishinaabe people. Claudia is well known for her vibrant and expressive murals. They are literally all over Ottawa and explore themes of identity, culture and social justice. You'll hear the color and the energy in her voice. I asked Claudia to give an example of one of her projects. She spoke about The Wisdom Mural, which is inspired by the teachings of Ottawa based knowledge keepers. I love the way Claudia identifies three key elements of… community, beauty, nature.
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Discover the story behind Ottawa’s vibrant murals and the artist who uses art to connect communities and heal hearts. From a vision inspired by nature to a powerful encounter with a grieving stranger, explore the transformative power of community-engaged art.
Chapter Summary
00:00 The Essence of Community, Beauty, and Nature
00:56 Meet Claudia Salguero
01:37 The Wisdom Mural: A Dream Project
03:51 Engaging with Knowledge Keepers
05:30 Symbolism and Meaning in the Mural
08:02 Community Engagement Through Art
11:54 Art as a Healing Tool
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Behind the Story
Claudia Salguero shares the inspiration behind her Wisdom Mural, a project that brought together ten knowledge keepers from around the world to explore the unifying power of nature. The mural, a towering piece of public art in Ottawa, has become a symbol of connection and healing, especially poignant during the pandemic and the discovery of unmarked graves at indigenous residential schools. One moving story highlights how the mural helped a grieving man find solace after years of pain.
Transcription
Note: This is an automated transcription that is provided for those who prefer to read this conversation and for documentation. It has been verified but is not 100% accurate (some names might not be quite right). Please contact me if you would like to quote from this transcript: claude@conscient.ca
[00:00:00] Claudia Salguero
To me, there's three key things and it's community, beauty and nature. I think if we connect with nature and if we produce beauty, that is something that we as humans I think is our biggest gift. And I'm not just talking about creating art, is speaking beauty, listening to beauty, creating beauty, opening our hearts to beauty in community. Because if we don't have a sense of the other in ourselves, then we're lost, we cannot do it alone. And this has been proved forever. But I think if we have these three things, to me, as the kind of person I am, we have it all. We're connected with nature, understanding that we are nature, we are part, we are one with nature and we are interacting with other human beings.
And we create beauty and we inspire by beauty. It would be a completely different world. And that to me is like the mission of the Arts.
[00:00:56] Claude Schryer
Episode 240 My Conversation with Claudia Salguero, a Colombian Canadian community engaged artist based in Ottawa, where I live. Claudia is well known for her vibrant and expressive murals. They are literally all over Ottawa and they tend to explore themes of identity, culture and social justice. You'll hear the color and the energy in her voice. I asked Claudia to give an example of one of her projects since she spoke about the Wisdom Mural, which is inspired by the teachings of Ottawa based knowledge keepers. I love the way Claudia identifies three key elements of community, beauty, nature.
Well, I'm looking at a photograph of the Wisdom mural and I'd like to hear about it, the story of this particular mural. You've done many murals around this community in Ottawa and I'll put links in the episode notes for people to go to your website. But maybe talk to me about this project and through the project. Why, how you do community based arts?
[00:02:14] Claudia Salguero
Well, this project was my biggest dream and at one point I just said, well, I'm going to try to do it. My question, my deepest question was how can we connect? Is there something that as human beings bring us together? We've proved so many things and many don't work. Of course, the arts is one music, live concert, live art is a very important part of that. And we see each other when we are sharing art. But there should be something deeper, something that is like the truth, the real thing.
And I went deeper, deeper and deeper in this question and I thought it was nature. So I think, I thought, well before religions, before politics, before races, before countries being divided, what was there that was true for everyone? And it was nature. And I think at one point we were all worshiping the song and the moon and the water and the fertility of the earth. And then I said, well, what about creating a mural about this?
But it's not my. I cannot say this. I need to prove if that is possible, that this can happen. And then I started asking the question to many different persons. And I got to these 10 knowledge keepers from around the world who live in Ottawa from the five continents, including an Algonquin elder, an Inuit elder, and a Metis elder, because we are in this land and I respect it so much and I've learned so much from them. And I asked the question what it means, what nature means to you and your cosmology, your roots, your ancestry. And I said, please think about it.
And I told them about this idea of the mural. And one of them actually said, claudia, you're crazy. And at the end, they were saying, wow, I apologize. I never thought you were going to do it, but the mural is there. But they were very key on this because they really went into it.
They work on it. And when they were ready, we had two roundtables that you can listen to in my website. You'll see the links to my YouTube channel where these conversations are. And they had 30 minutes to explain that to themselves. And it was incredibly beautiful because they were bringing so much knowledge, so much meaning, and so much symbology and mythology to these conversations. And it was true. So they all agreed, yes, it was nature, and it means the same to all of us.
And then I was just. Got inspired from these conversations, created a mural, and we painted it together. They were part of this, of course. They. They were consulted. I said, well, this is the concept.
What do you think about it? They said, yes, this is exactly what we've been talking about for all these months.
It was through many months. It was through the pandemic. Then the mural is up there in bank and Riverside in a high-rise building. In that corner, it talks about how we. If you can see it, you'll see in the upper right corner, you see the Milky Way. And that means that we are stardust.
We come from there, right? And then we transform, and we became water. So here in this corner at the bottom, there's a human face looking up to nature in a very humble way, like acknowledging we are just part of you. We're just a drop of water in all this universe. The sunflower there, if you see the center, is the planet. And it's because the knowledge keeper from India at one point said, we are the petals of the same flower. We're petals of the same flower.
And that is the connection to me. That was the first image, clear image and the center point of the mural. And the mural grows around that. Then you see the stem that is dry at the bottom. And that means that the transformation from a dry and really like a make them leave little parts like destroyed stem and roots. If we think in this way we can restore nature, we can grow and heal, and that's the meaning of that. The colors in the bottom is, of course, diversity and the passing of time and cycles of life. Right. All the stars and the constellation at the top talk about how the stars have been so important for all these cultures around the world for millennia.
The stars are not just inspiration, but I said sense of orientation, meaning, cosmology, mythology. And this is all related into the arts, into archetypes. This is very deep and that belongs to all of us.
So the Fibonacci spiral, right? That to me, these beautiful images in many of my murals. And it means it's like the representation of perfection and creation and evolution. That is kind of our goal. Right. We hope to be perfect, and we are. Right. We just need to acknowledge it and really do it.
And the only element that you can identify that belongs to a culture is the medicine wheel, because we are in Algonquin land and because of how deep it is in meaning. So it's the only thing that you can really identify as belonging to any of the cultures that were part of the inspiration of the mural. The rest is universal and belong to all of us. And all the knowledge keepers agree with this. It's way more deep. Right. It was a long conversation, but this is.
And the other thing is the lines that you see there. Different colors are the ways and the languages in which we communicate with each other. They are different, they intersect, they cut each other's ways. But we are here and we can communicate.
It's not easy. We just need to really give space for interaction, listen to ourselves and keep going. It's very fluid, lots of meaning.
And then that's my. My biggest accomplishment. Not just because of the size. It's a huge mural that from the 9th to the 14th floor of a building is the tallest mural in Ottawa. But I don't think I can produce a mural with a deeper meaning than this one. I think this mural tells all what I would like to tell through my work as a community engaged muralist.
[00:08:55] Claude Schryer
What kind of response have you had?
[00:08:57] Claudia Salguero
It was amazing. Just even before knowing how the mural was going to look, because I never knew, I applied for my grants without knowing. I asked for help through a GoFundMe campaign without not knowing. It was just me telling the story. This is what we need to talk about. This is what these knowledge keepers want to tell you. And this is what I think, what we all need to hear, especially during the pandemic, that there's a way to be together.
And the response was amazing. I got, like, thousands of dollars in this GoFundMe campaign, which I never thought of. For people who didn't know me, There was a foundation in Europe that sent me some money because they believe in this. So somebody said to me, the thing is that you didn't made it. You were used to do this. There's something greater than you that used you for this to be told. And I was like, really?
So that was one of these reactions that meant a lot to me. And there was just one person who came after the mural was installed that happened in one day. So a person who lived in a. In a building in front of it.
It's a big guy, Canadian guy, was just very upset. So who's in charge here?
He said, me. And then he looked at me. You know what I've been trying.
I like peace. I like subtle colors. I don't like violent things coming up to me. And I opened the windows this morning, I just see this mural with all these colors, and I don't like it because it is like an aggression. And nobody asked me for this. And what is this? And then I started just telling him this story, and I told him, too, that the mural has 1,000 stars that you can count.
They were counted. And we painted these stars at the very end of the process where the graves of the indigenous kids were found. That happened the same week. And it was so painful. So I was working with an indigenous mentee, and of course it was the grandmother Algonquin. And I called them and said, can we. Would you agree if we paint this 1000 stars in honor of these kids?
And they said, yes. So we painted them. Then I told this story to this person, and he started crying like a little kid. He cried and cried and cried and cried.
[00:11:12] Claude Schryer
I’m going to cry.
[00:11:13] Claudia Salguero
He cried and don't cry, please. But he was crying like a little boy. And then he sit down on the floor and said, I'm going to tell you. He said, my wife committed suicide seven or eight years ago. And it's been so painful to me that I've been going through all of this in my house. There's no scholars, because I can't stand anything. I'm super sensitive to anything that I don't produce, etc.
But then he looked up and he saw the stars and he said, now I know where my wife is. And that was the end of the conversation. And he was as grateful as he could be. And we communicated once after and he was okay. And he said, you're part of my journey. And this is what art does.
[00:11:58] Claude Schryer
What kind of art do you think do we need in times like this?
[00:12:02] Claudia Salguero
So I always say that I'm an interpreter of other person's voices, especially communities or people who don't have the voice. Local low-income communities, immigrants, refugees, women that have gone through violence in so many ways, or kids that are in trouble, like youth. And I think the most important mission I have is to listen to them and to keep doing what I do, which is paint a mural where they can see themselves and they can keep telling the story and the story is still there. So these murals are not just a pretty image. They are sometimes they are not really the most beautiful mural in the world, but it doesn't matter. The important part of this community mural creations is not the mural itself. It's all that happens around it or before or behind the mural.
So the conversations I heard while we were painting, because I don't paint with spray paints because it would be like a today's project, I spent one or two weeks working with the community for the whole day. So it's like 70 hours, 50 hours working with one community. And then I see the interactions with the community, I engage them in conversations, I ask questions and I keep the conversation going about what we're painting. That was something they said or something else. Because things happen while you're creating art. And when you have a brush in your hand, nobody's judging you because the idea is that you don't have to be an artist. You just come and I'll help you, I'll guide you, I'll teach you.
Don't worry, just have fun. Just come here and relax and interact with your neighbors or with people from your community that sometimes you have issues with and things just flow in an incredible way.
[00:13:56] Claude Schryer
What do you recommend people, artists, cultural workers, citizens do in these difficult times? Do you have suggestions, points of action for them to get further engaged through art?
[00:14:09] Claudia Salguero
I think as artists, if they are community engaged artists, I think they are doing it. We just need to keep listening and putting ourselves in other person's shoes and try to understand why they think what they think, what they do, what they do, because that's the only way we can talk. So I think if in general, not just artists, but everyone, we need to learn to listen, to understand why somebody think the way they think. Because it's not for free. You have reasons to be who you are and to act in the way you act. So I think that would be important. And then when you learn to listen and you help people to express that, you are just giving this person opportunity to heal and yourself opportunity to understand.
And by you doing it, you are helping the process in all directions in other people.