Standing four stories tall on the side of an apartment building in El Salvador, a massive new mural is stopping everyone who walks by dead in their tracks, and not just because of its enormous size. The artwork is a reimagined Mona Lisa with a distinctly Latin American face, and every single inch of it was built entirely from trash. Artist Óscar Olivares, just 29 years old, constructed the 43-foot mural using 100,000 plastic bottle caps collected by community volunteers over several months, none of which were painted or altered in any way. Each cap went in exactly the color it already was, with Olivares carefully calculating that roughly 1,100 caps would be needed for every square meter of the finished portrait.
The neighborhood where the mural stands, called Zacamil, was until recently controlled by gangs who used graffiti to mark their territory, and Olivares chose this location specifically to replace that history with something that belonged to everyone who lived there. The project is part of a growing effort to transform the area’s buildings into an open-air museum, and the whole community threw itself behind it, with neighbors gathering, washing, and sorting discarded bottle caps from streets and gutters for months before a single one was placed on the wall. Olivares draws his inspiration from the Pointillist painters of the 1800s, who built images from thousands of individual colored dots that only become recognizable when viewed from a distance. Up close, he says, some caps look battered and grimy from years spent in the trash, but step back a few paces and a woman’s calm, confident gaze comes together with startling clarity. Olivares has now completed murals like this in 11 countries, and says every single one teaches him something new about the kindness and creativity of the people who help him make it.
