Just after finishing my mural in Zugliano I jumped on a plain to reach Latvia. I already painted in Riga 3 years before and I was happy to meet again my street painting family (we were 15, mostly 3D pavement artists from all ove the world).
I performed in the north part of the city, in the wonderful Mezaparks.
The title of my draw was emblematic ‘To bee or not to bee’.
Millions of bees are dying off every year, and scientists point to a widely used class of pesticides as one of the main causes. In 2018 European Union approved ban on three pesticides that kill them (good but on late!) therefore there is still a lot to do.
In the draw a giant woman put a gas mask on the head of a bee. The bee is dark and quite robotic, it has something strange and scary. It looks like a different new insect. Pollution changed insects in stronger ones.
The title is a joke as you can read but it reveals a tough on the Hamletic sentence ‘to be or not to be’, one of the most famous lines in all of English literature. What happens after death? Is it better to act or to remain inactive? Is existence (living) worth the pain?
There’s a sense of frustration in this soliloquy that however bad life is we’re prevented from doing anything about it by fear of the unknown. Let’s change and moreover, it is time to act.
The festival was really good and with a warm welcome. Lots of people stopped at my painting asking about the meaning of the draw. Some of them arrived when I was wearing my strange mask to pose on the bee. It was supposed to be a bee mask but if you really observe it you can see that it was a wasp mask. So, at the end the answer could be ‘not to bee’. That’s to say that we are really creating a bad world to live! If we mind about it we have to change our way of living cause it is not more sustainable!
In the park also street artists from the theater came and it was magic. We have been in Jurmala to visit the city too. One day to rest before painting and it was funny. Think Riga is more beautiful than Jurmala and some of my dreams are still there.
