Parees is Oviedo’s contextual and situated muralism festival. Since 2017 we have worked with artists, local communities and institutions to make the city’s walls tell stories worth telling. We don’t decorate. We research, we listen, we paint.
Why a mural and not something else?
Walls have spent millennia holding what a society doesn’t want to forget. First in caves, then in churches, then on the facades of neighbourhoods that were fighting to exist. Painting a wall has always been a political act, even when it doesn’t look like one.
At Parees we start from that conviction: a mural intervention is not an ornament. It’s a decision about which stories deserve to occupy public space and which ones risk disappearing. That’s why every edition begins before the first brushstroke, when there’s still no sketch, when we’re still in the square listening.
Contextual muralism and situated muralism: not the same thing
There’s a difference worth naming.
A contextual mural dialogues with the physical environment: it respects the scale of the building, converses with the neighbourhood’s colours, fits the landscape. It’s good practice and the necessary starting point. Parees always works from there.
But situated muralism goes further. The territory is not just the backdrop: it’s the source of the content. The subject isn’t brought in ready-made, it’s excavated. It emerges from the oral memory of the place, from its tensions, from what the people living beneath that wall have been feeling for years without anyone having painted it yet.
The practical difference is this: a contextual mural could be made in another city with minor adjustments. A situated mural can only exist there, on that wall, in that neighbourhood, with that history.
Parees pursues that second model. We don’t always get all the way there, but it’s the direction that shapes the work.
How an intervention is prepared
The process starts with finding the wall: drifting through the city, conversations with residents’ associations, analysis of the facade’s physical condition and what happens around it. A wall isn’t chosen just for its size or visibility. It’s chosen because it has something to say.
Then comes the research: physical, historical and social layers. What memories inhabit that place. What tensions run through it. Who uses it and how. That research becomes a field dossier that the artist receives before arriving, so their first visit to the neighbourhood isn’t that of a stranger.
The choice of artists follows the same logic: we’re not looking for the most visible name, we’re looking for the fit. Which artist, at their current creative moment, can make that subject breathe. When that fit works, a preliminary sketch becomes unnecessary: trust in the process is enough.
Quality over quantity
Parees is entirely funded by public money from the Oviedo City Council’s Municipal Culture Foundation. That defines our limits and our commitment.
Every intervention includes prior diagnosis and repair of the wall: cracks, damp, primers, professional exterior paints. A situated mural is heritage from day one and has to be treated as such.
The whole team — artists, mediation, production, communication — works under fair conditions: proper fees, meals, insurance and an approach that doesn’t normalise precariousness. Nobody works for free. That’s not generosity, it’s consistency with what we ask of the territory.
Routes and activities
After each edition, the murals don’t get left alone. We organise guided routes through the pieces, explaining processes, contexts and the stories each mural holds. Also muralism workshops for families and groups, and in several editions, cycling routes connecting the interventions across the city.
The aim is the same as the mural’s: for those who live here to feel it as their own.
The wall is already inhabited. We just need to learn to read it.
Every wall Parees works on has been waiting for years. Not empty, but loaded: with trades fading out, with memories nobody has painted yet, with tensions the neighbourhood knows and maps don’t capture.
Our work is not to fill it. It’s to listen first.
Because a mural that hasn’t listened to the place where it’s going to live is just paint. And paint fades.