“It’s the typical tapestry that a Haitian granny would make of Sanfermin”

05/05/2004.

After the announcement was made by the jury of the winning entry of the poster to announce the forthcoming Sanfermin fiestas, Mikel Urmeneta expressed his satisfaction and explained some of the key elements of the winning poster which he had created along with Marta Coronado. First, he felt that it was “what a typical granny from Haiti would have made if she had ever been to Sanfermin”. “We wanted to display the most characteristic elements of Sanfermin, the running of the bulls and also the mass of people and all the partying. We wanted to express the warmth of the spirit of the fiestas. We also conscientiously tried to get a certain deformity in the figures.

This meant a lot of time and effort was spent on the work, especially by Marta, who worked so hard on the craftsmanship of the poster”, he added. Asked if he felt that 2004 could be his year and that of Kukuxumusu, he pointed out: “For sure, we will be a bit “heavy” and I don’t know if our underlining role is going to annoy the City Hall or not, but I really believe that it is not a bad thing.” Besides, the poster does have a style that does suggest something of Kukuxumusu, but at the same time, it is not exactly in line with the kind of designs we are producing right now for our label“.

Fourteen years on and Mikel Urmeneta has been chosen once again as the winning entrant for the Sanfermin poster, something which gives him a special satisfaction. “It’s particularly pleasing because it is like rising again from my granny ashes. Any competition needs an element of luck to win it, but it is nice that fourteen years later I can still go on displaying the fiestas as I have them in my head.” Other details such as showing the sexual members of the bulls have not gone unnoticed. For Mikel this is irrelevant, “I have always liked to establish some sexual element in my drawings”.

Summing up the drawing, Urmeneta added some details such as the fact that he had made the drawing by using his left hand and that it was not his intention to create a controversial drawing: “I was not looking for a polemical drawing, I just wanted to break with the tendency of the past four years of displaying rather cold designs, even though I might also have admired the quality of some of them.” As for Marta Colorado, an essential contributor to the finished poster, she also expressed her satisfaction with the successful outcome. She was responsible for producing the original idea that Mikel Urmeneta came up with. In fact, she carried out the work while she was down with the flu and off work for some days. It took her three days to finish the piece on a background of tee shirt cloth. Her pleasure on hearing the jury’s decision was obvious. She explained how “we wanted to give it a distinctive look, and that is why we decided to carry out the design in this way, with the figures somewhat lopsided. We also worked hard to try to make the figures somewhat imperfect”.