El Faro, Corathao

Their presence made everyone uneasy. They were off-putting in their manner of being. Inhumanly tall, they made streets and walkways feel narrower, and they blocked out the sun. They were cold to the touch, and their achromatic uniformity made us distance ourselves without hesitation. We didn’t trust them. They were part of the great economic wave of change that was sweeping our district. First came the infrastructure; new roads, highways, railroads, and runways. Then came the power stations and with them came warehouses and depositories. They arrived with them.

We had welcomed their arrival assuming they would be sensitive to our culture and traditions, but they were numb, heartless even. Their disposition was unwavering. Even after almost a year, they still had the same callous attitude as when they arrived. Their stern comportment was changing us. Their unrelenting presence dampened our self-expression and creativity. We walked to school with our eyes glued to our boots. No one rode their bike anymore. Nor did anyone skip, sing, dance, or even speak when in their company. We were becoming like them: stale, without an identity, banal. We had become quiet shells of our former selves ever since The Walls arrived.

The worst part was that there wasn’t anything we could do. We needed the Walls as they held up the roofs of the numerous power stations, warehouses, and depots around the community. They held up stairs and had windows and doors in them. Tearing them down meant destroying our very own livelihood. Fighting was futile. Those sinister brutes made of thick, heavy concrete blocks patrolled us pervasively in a heavy silence, controlling us.

There was a girl in the same year as me who had always been a little more different than the rest of us. It wasn’t the bad-kind of different; she was more unique than different really. If the headmaster ordered that all girls come to school with their hair up in a tidy bun she would wear it down wildly with flowers and butterflies in her hair. Once, when we were little, she arrived to a birthday party painted head-to-toe with earthly insignias made with her mom’s watercolors. When our art teacher asked us to paint a landscape on a canvas, she decided to paint waves and spirals of energy on her face explaining to us that she could feel the energy of the universe flowing through mind, eyes, and soul. Many said she was disturbed or rebellious, a renegade, but she wasn’t. She was a free spirit. No person or thing would ever dominate Alexandra.

One day walking home from school I overheard music coming from Alexandra’s backyard. When I poked my head through a void in her yard’s bushes I saw a teal oil-painted Alexandra covered in the same energy wave markings from art class. She had in her hands a tall musical bow with a single string and a hollowed-out gourd, a small stone, a wooden stick, and a shaker. The song began with a slow tempo but quickly picked up speed as she began to move in a circle, intricately moving her feet and body to the changing tempo. She was performing a ceremony. Suddenly there came a thunderous roar from the sky above us and a giant blue portal full of torrential waves, swells, coils, and blossoms with eyes appeared. The thing in the portal was alive.

Its multiple eyes blinked simultaneously and a blinding ray jettisoned from the portal down to where Alexandra was still playing in a frenzy. When I opened my eyes Alexandra had disappeared. Our lady Corathao, the goddess of imagination and artistry had taken her place. Corathao had the world’s rivers running in her hair in brilliant tones of azure, sapphire, and cerulean. Her skin appeared char red, as if scorched by the sun radiating a serene warmth. She neither had an iris nor pupil in her eyes. Her eyes and lips shone in the white silver of the stars. She began to ascend to the sky and spread her arms wide as I ran to the community square where everyone had gathered to witness the ongoing miracle. As she rose a crescent moon appeared at her back, and in an instant her torso emitted a ring of blue energy.

The blue ring made its way through the square, gently laying everyone it touched onto the ground and into a deep slumber. Just before the ring swept through me I could see Corathao’s silver-star lips inaudibly mouthing something to the zephyrs, gusts, and breaths of the earth. As I was laid down to sleep on the warm earth, as if by the wind itself, I could see Corathao smiling delicately, like a floret.

When we awoke the following day we struggled to recognize our surroundings. There were birds chirping, trees and grasses had been revived, the air had the sweet scent of renewal, and there was color on the Walls. Corathao had dealt with the Walls. Rather than demolishing or breaking them, she had granted them a new life by giving faces full of expression and stories. We ran over to the Walls, dancing and singing, as we ran our hands across their new amiable faces. I removed my shirt and embraced the Wall neighboring my house, and as I planted my chest and cheek on its face I could feel a jubilant warmth being breathed by the once-frigid Wall.

The Walls were alive with the colors of Corathao. Everywhere we looked there were walls with murals of mighty earthly spirits. One spirit had untamed hair which transformed into young fluttering butterflies.

Another spirit meditated at the center of a shell whilst her heart shined through her chest as a ripe avocado. The murals were ethereal visions from the beyond. Their origins unknown, but their messages were clear. Joy, delight, laughter, dancing, peace, harmony, mindfulness, strength, empowerment, and above all life through creative expression.

I found Alexandra sleeping peacefully on a bed of white flowers. Her body had triangular shards all over which softly gleamed with tones of repose and tranquility; fragments of the transformation. Corathao, la Salerosa, had helped us bridge a gap of misunderstanding and befriend our oppressors, and Alexandra the free-spirited was our champion.

We realized there were still many communities outside of ours that were still being encumbered by comatose Walls. And so we set off, with musical bows of our own and spray paint, to awaken our comrades with Alexandra lighting the way.

-The story was created in junction with the Housto-baseed street artist Corathao. Her work is often performed on the sides of overlooked warehouses or ignored walls in an underpass. Constructs that most people wouldn’t recognize as architecture because of their function, lack of apparent design, or intent to be unassuming. Yet it is this type of construction which becomes the perfect canvas for guerilla creative expression by the people the thing was built for. It’s a way of giving back to architecture, by giving its comatose soul an injection of colorful life. Artists, like Corathao, have found a way to bridge the frigid abyss that sometimes occurs between our modern and/or contemporrary buildings and the people they were built for.