European Communication – Cip!

Eco Mural Art: Pere Blanco Molina 
Storytelling: Oana Maroti

Having lived in Spain for almost a decade and worked in other languages, it took me a while to remember the name of this bird in my native language. I called it by default: pasarica, which means little bird.

This is a painting of a Passer domesticus, sparrow in English, gorrión in Spanish, and vrabia in Romanian. It is a mural by Pere Blanco Molina and is located in Glories, Barcelona. Pere made a large painting of a small bird, famous from the ancient to the new continent.

The sparrow is an international diva. Artists, inspired by the presence of this singing muse, have immortalized it in visual representations, and poets have noted its melody. The sparrow´s Cip cip! is part of this world´s identity.

It seems legit to see large-scale representations of such a global symbol, a cute conquistador who jumps and sings, which everyone loves to have around.

My impulse was to translate “Big Little Bird” into Romanian, but the double meaning makes it strange, because “pasarica” is also a preferred name for female genitalia, and an augmentative translation would be wrong. Whether the preferred name, “pasarica”, pussy in English refers to the melodic feminine sound or to the song of a bird caught in a trap and encaged, remains to be discovered. What´s certain is that women are still not respected or considered a product, many of those finding themselves in a vulnerable situation get abused, used for a while, like the melody of a bird, and sold out.

Painter Pere Blanco Molina makes an effort to correlate elements of collective memory with ecological or social issues. In the case of the sparrow, it is an invitation to a deep intercultural meditation on immigration and ecology, by acknowledging the ancient inhabitants of this planet, with whom we share the space.

This street intervention is an international call for the protection of habitats, but also a manifesto for human rights.