Cuadrilla Vitale (Para mí no quiero)

About the project

Guillermo Vitale (1907-1992) found art late in life, or perhaps it was art that found him.

He dropped a bathroom tile whilst doing repairs in his house, and in the pieces scattered on the floor, he discovered his vocation. It is perhaps a fortuitous paradox that a pensioner with impoverished eyesight was destined to create the most exquisite visual representation of community life in Cerro – a spirited neighbourhood of the Uruguayan capital, Montevideo. Until his death – aged 85 – he created over 100 mosaics commemorating community heroes of international and local fame. He built playgrounds with recycled materials, collected signatures to petition the authorities to grant his neighbourhood independent status as a city, gardened the roadside entries to Cerro and was known to everybody as an expert in local history, forever pushing a wheelbarrow loaded with the materials of his art.

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Ana Laura López de la Torre, Cuadrilla Vitale (Para mí no quiero), Mosaic depicting Ariel Orozco, an architect and philantropist who supported many community venues in Cerro, including the upkeeping of its main football ground.

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Ana Laura López de la Torre, Cuadrilla Vitale (Para mí no quiero), Mosaic depicting Pedro Arispe (1900-1960). Olympic Champion and the first football player from Cerro to play for the national side. A star player for Rampla Juniors – one of Cerro’s two rival teams.

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Ana Laura López de la Torre, Cuadrilla Vitale (Para mí no quiero), Carlos Gardel was a favourite subject of Vitale’s work. In the many portraits he created of the celebrated tango singer, the development of Vitale’s compositional and technical skills can be traced. This is an early mosaic located on a now derelict property.

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Ana Laura López de la Torre, Cuadrilla Vitale (Para mí no quiero), Aside from mosaics on the front of community venues, Vitale used any space that was made available to him. Here’s an example of a group of 7 mosaics on the separation wall between two houses. Many of these mosaics are at risk, because of the precarious conditions of the houses.

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Ana Laura López de la Torre, Cuadrilla Vitale (Para mí no quiero), Mosaic depicting Pedro Arispe (1900-1960). Olympic Champion and the first football player from Cerro to play for the national side. A star player for Rampla Juniors – one of Cerro’s two rival teams.

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Ana Laura López de la Torre, Cuadrilla Vitale (Para mí no quiero), Carlos Gardel was a favourite subject of Vitale’s work. In the many portraits he created of the celebrated tango singer, the development of Vitale’s compositional and technical skills can be traced. This is an early mosaic located on a now derelict property

This proposal sought to preserve and reinvigorate Vitale’s legacy as emblematic of Cerro, through a conceptual community art project that would have brought together a significant cross-section of the community with artists, researchers, and cultural institutions. Through collaborative and participatory processes, this “Vitale Crew” would have devised and implemented a collective strategy for the preservation of Vitale’s legacy and its deployment as a radical tool for grassroots-led regeneration while working to reconstitute the public image of the neighborhood, contesting media and mainstream stigmatising of the area as marginal and dangerous.

About the artist

Like Vitale, I was born in Montevideo in a family of economic migrants. Aged 19, I moved to Europe escaping my parents’ expectations of marriage and university. After training as a woodcarver and working in a religious sculpture workshop in Madrid during the 1990s, I gradually transitioned towards conceptual art, seeking a happier encounter between artistic vocation and political activism. In 1997, I graduated with an MA from Central St Martins College of Art & Design. With growing interest in socially-oriented work came commissions from public institutions: Whitechapel Gallery, Gasworks, Arts & Business, La Casa Encendida (Madrid), Tate Modern and Tate Britain.