From painting street walls to designing an open-air museum. Puerto Street-Art, a space open to creativity

Abstract

Puerto de la Cruz, a municipality of Tenerife, has designed a unique open-air museum whose "rooms" will include everything from mural paintings to sculptures, as well as creative interventions in urban furniture. Our objective is to document this cultural process in order to disseminate the management model, as well as the strategies that have been proposed since the initiative arose to the present day. Our method, after initial fieldwork in which we classified the different interventions carried out, consisted of consulting the official sources provided by members of the Urban Planning Consortium for the Rehabilitation of Puerto de la Cruz, whose different memories enriched us, during interviews, with their personal contribution. Given that the proposal, despite being derived from a museum perspective, carries with it the possible ephemeral nature of some murals, in addition to documenting them, we went on to comment on them from an artistic critical perspective, exploring their thematic and technical variety. To do this, in some cases we also used interviews and the websites of the artists involved, as their continuous updating guaranteed that we were up to date on their careers and other similar interventions. Having analysed other actions, we consider that the interest of our work is that it contributes to the value of one of the few initiatives that have been carried out in the Canary Islands aimed at improving the urban environment and that can serve as a model for other localities, a proposal that has not been addressed by any other research until now, which guarantees its originality.