Two shopkeepers with adjacent stalls at the Paris Wincey Mills Co. market in downtown Paris have received an Ontario Culture Days Spotlight Award.
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Carolina Saenz of La Trenza Tacos, and Lisa Franklin of Forest and Folk were named recipients of the Best Collaborative Program — one of only four Spotlight Awards presented across the province – for their Paris Birds of Diversity project.
“It was Carolina’s idea to begin with, and she asked me to join in,” Franklin explained. “They have a family friend who is an artist (in Oaxaca, Mexico) that started making these birds to bring awareness to birds being (captured and) removed from forests.”
Franklin said the idea was for the two of them to make the birds and have the community paint them in ways that represented themselves or what they stood for. The initially small project grew substantially after talks with the Paris BIA that was looking for a way to visually lead people through the downtown to Culture Days events.
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“We ended up building about 115 of these,” she said of the bird figures, made mainly from recycled materials.
Artist Manuel Molina from Oaxaca City, Mexico paid the women a visit during his travels through Ontario and showed them the process to construct the birds using heavy-duty cardboard from watermelon boxes, a mixture of sawdust and glue, and corn husks.
“The corn husks are very different here than in Oaxaca,” she explained. “We had a lot of trouble with the drying time, as some of them would go moldy or splinter and become sharp.”
They ended up utilizing leaves used to wrap tamales for the larger birds but decided to go with craft paper dipped into a glue mixture for the smaller versions.
A couple of workshops were organized through the Culture Days website where people could register to come and paint the birds. A few pop-up events were also held at Wincey Mills on weekends, as well as a session in Lions Park for a home-schooling organization.
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“This was a really beautiful project that (involved) people of all ages,” Saenz shared. “Little kids, their parents, even the elderly – everyone enjoyed it, and every bird ended up looking so different.”
Neither of the women were aware the awards existed until they received notifications by email.
“It was a nice recognition because we worked very hard on the project,” Saenz shared. “We truly did it just out of passion and wanted to bring a bit of positivity. With Paris growing so much and the area developing, we hear a lot of people focusing on the negatives that development brings.
“We thought it would be a wonderful celebration of diversity in our area. It was a fun project that we wanted to do, and for me, sharing that story of the project that started in Mexico with my new community, my new home.”
The three-week Ontario Culture Days fall festival featured 1,853 free community events across the province making it Ontario’s largest and most diverse celebration of arts, culture, and heritage in 2024.
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