Blue Sky is pleased to announce Shine Heroes/Héroes del Brillo, our 2021 Critical Mass Solo Exhibition Winner, with work by Federico Estol.

The exhibition, Shine Heroes, comes out of a project Uruguayan artist, Federico Estol, started three years ago as he began engaging with the shoe shiners of Bolivia. There are 3,000 shoe shiners who go out into the streets of La Paz and El Alto suburbs each day in search of clients. They are from all ages and in recent years have become a social phenomenon in the Bolivian capital.

What characterizes this tribe is the use of ski masks so they will not be recognized by those around them. They confront the discrimination they face through these masks; in their neighborhoods no one knows that they work as shoe shiners, at school they hide this fact, and even their own families believe they have a different job when they head down to the center of the city from El Alto.

Estol collaborated with sixty shoe shiners associated with the shoe shiners newspaper "Hormigón Armado" with the idea to create a photobook. Together they planned the scenes during a series of graphic novel workshops depicting the new andean architecture of El Alto as its background. In this process, the shine heroes became both producers and protagonists of a street-style photobook to fight against a social stigma.

Today this group makes its living primarily from selling the photobook and postcards of the project more than from being shoe shiners. This casts light on the possibilites of art in transforming discrimination into a sign of struggle and survival that could ultimately help promote social integration.

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