La Mama, 2017 & 2021

La Mama is a 20ft statue of a pregnant mother-earth goddess with an entrance into her belly from behind the sculpture which houses a sound-immersive capsule, powered by a 5.1 surround sound system, for two people to lie down and re-live the womb experience. La Mama represents our first ever effort in creating monumental sculptures and she was created through trial and error with substantial experimentation with various methods and materials.

The Misfits Unified core group created La Mama in the final months of 2016 in preparation for the January 2017 painting festival, the Mythic Party. Inspired by the creative enthusiasm of the participants of the previous year’s art festival (the artists, and non-artists alike) this time absolutely everybody was invited to come and paint together. The result is a monumental sculpture which was brought to life by a total of 30 people and is a fusion of individual inspirations and styles all combined into one permanent statue. La Mama is a tribute to mother earth, in honor of every mother and in honor of mother nature.

Sadly, because of the degree of trial and error and experimentation through the creation of La Mama, various parts of her began to absorb humidity over the years and as a result were deteriorating as time went by. Each year the Misfits team would repair parts of her, and in our efforts to preserve and/or replicate the original artwork we realized that with the growing number of areas we patched she was beginning look worse and worse – our efforts to preserve the original artwork was compounding the issues and in the beginning of 2021, we decided to bite the bullet and undertake a full restoration.

So, we stripped her down and utilized all that we have learnt over the subsequent years about creating sculptures that are resilient to the harsh weather conditions of the tropics. In January 2021 she was completely repainted in the same energy but with a different style that reflects the artistic expression of the participants of the 2021 event.


Presenting La Mama...

Painting inside the womb