Alvaro Moreno  Rajagiri College of Social Sciences University of Dhaka  Khurais Mega            I have been working for an association since 2005 called United Nations, created in  Toulouse with the aim of creating artistic projects inspired by the cultural fusion of Latin  America and Europe.   The most difficult thing at the beginning of the association is not only creating art, but art that  can interest a local audience. The night parties and concerts were the most successful at  first among a group of young students between the ages of 22 to 26. Musical and dance  were more welcome than sculpture or audiovisual projects.   After the first 3 years the association went through several ups and downs of the budget.  until 2007...  At that year we had the opportunity to do the first international urban art festival with Latin  American guests in France. We were not prepared as an association for that time.

Latino Arte: Latin American urban art festival in Europe.

I’d traveled to Bogotá where I was meeting the elite of local street art. Their desire was to  travel to Europe and show their talent.   The first step was to convince the other members of the association, that this was an  opportunity to achieve several objectives:

1. Create a true international art project

2. Increase our visibility in the cultural spectrum of Toulouse and Colombia

3. Incursion into another unknown but interesting artistic field

For convincing a group of people about a project, the most important thing I think is the  visual. A logo with which a project can be identified, in addition to that I think is also  necessary a poster or a cover image. With this first step (the logo), people can get an idea of  ​what it represents and how it is represented. Like the Latino Arte logo:

Once the logo is established, then it is necessary to continue with the visual to nurture the  storytelling, a message or an idea. I was looking for a story or a curious fact.   So I went to look that, in the history of graffiti in Bogotá. The strange thing is that it has to do  with Justin Bieber.

“In 2011 after the murder of Diego Felipe Becerra in Bogotá, by the police. The public  opinion had as an excuse that he had been sought out as a vandal, polluting the  streets of the city with graffiti. A week after this disastrous event, was Justin Bieber's  visit to the city. Where, accompanied by the police, he went under one of the bridges  to do a tag. The police hypocrisy and citizens double standards, angered hundreds of  urban artists, who in one night filled many walls of the city with paint in protest of the  event. From that moment the mayor's office, with no other choice, decided to provide  support for urban art, and since that moment Bogota became one of the street art  capitals in Latin America.

With this story in hand, it was easy to allow the other people get involved into the context,  but the context needs an aesthetic, the visual set that develops the universe of the idea.   The dossier :

With the agreement of the graphic content that would come to Toulouse thanks to the  guests, only remained some problems.  The problem of not having a previous basis for an event of this size, and no budget, so for  those reasons some of the members abandoned the project for fear of failure. Of 15  associates in Guayabo, only 2 remained for the organization of the event and the search for  resources.     At that time we went to look for stakeholders in the world of local urban art, to ask them for  walls. Paint companies wanting to recycle materials that were going to be sent to the trash.  We even contacted a circus association called Cirque du Soleil, who gave us kind of a hostel for

the artists' stay for ten days.     At the end of a long process to leave our comfort zone understanding the complex world of  Latin American urban art, seeking and finding new partners for the development of the  project and reducing costs with collaborative solutions, the other members of the association  were able to understand that the challenge creating the festival was not so much economic,  but creative, innovating solutions for each problem.   They decided to come back, stay and work with us.     Since then the festival has become the most important project of the association, winning in  2014 the help of the French Ministry of Culture, in 2011 a contract with France Tv in Paris  and with the Clermont Ferrand mayor's office, and in 2016 a contract with the Lille city.

