SAWA: A Community Mural in NW Calgary

The word sawa means "together" in Arabic. It also means "equal." It is, in both senses, a word about the absence of distance between people. When KINN Studios was invited to lead a collaborative mural project on a large exterior wall in northwest Calgary, that word became the conceptual anchor for everything that followed: the design, the process, the community engagement, and the final work itself.

This was not a commission in the conventional sense. It was a community art project, one that required the same spatial rigour and design discipline as any architectural installation, but with an additional layer of responsibility. The wall belonged to the neighbourhood. The imagery had to speak for it.

Painting from the Lift

Working on an exterior wall of this scale demanded industrial access. The mural was painted from a hydraulic lift, a method that changes the relationship between the artist and the surface in fundamental ways. There is no stepping back to evaluate composition from a distance. Every mark is made at close range, trusting the design system to hold across a surface that the painter cannot see in its entirety while working. It requires a disciplined approach to scale, colour mapping, and spatial planning long before the first brushstroke lands.

The lift itself became part of the project's public identity. Neighbours stopped to watch. Children gathered. The visible, physical act of painting, elevated against the sky, high-visibility jacket and harness in full view, turned the production process into a form of public engagement that no consultation meeting could replicate. The mural was being made in real time, in full view, and the neighbourhood claimed it before the final coat had dried.

Community as Co-Author

The design of SAWA was informed by direct engagement with the community it was intended to serve. This was not a matter of gathering feedback on colour palettes. It was a process of listening, understanding the cultural fabric of a neighbourhood, and translating that into a visual language that would feel both specific and inclusive. The word sawa emerged from those conversations, not as a slogan, but as a shared value that residents recognised in their own experience of the place.

Community murals occupy a particular position in public art practice. They must be legible without being literal. They must honour specificity without excluding anyone who walks past. They must endure weather, time, and the shifting demographics of a neighbourhood without becoming dated. SAWA was designed with all of these tensions held in balance, a work that speaks to the present composition of the community while remaining open enough to welcome whoever arrives next.

There is a tendency in public art discourse to treat murals as decoration, as surface treatments applied to otherwise unremarkable walls. KINN Studios rejects that framing. A mural is an architectural intervention. It changes the way a wall participates in the streetscape, the way pedestrians orient themselves, the way a building is remembered. SAWA transformed a blank exterior surface into a landmark, a point of orientation, a reason to look up.

The Work That Remains

The measure of a community mural is not the day it is unveiled. It is the year after, and the year after that. It is the moment when a resident gives directions using the mural as a reference point, when a child identifies it as something that was always there, when a newcomer to the neighbourhood encounters it and feels, without being told, that this is a place where people have chosen to invest in the quality of their shared environment.

SAWA was built for that kind of longevity. The materials, the palette, the composition, and the conceptual framework were all selected with permanence in mind. Not the permanence of a monument, but the permanence of a good neighbour: steady, present, and unassuming in the best possible way.

Public art in Calgary is entering a new phase. Communities are seeking work that reflects their identity rather than imposing one. SAWA is a contribution to that shift, a mural conceived not as an artist's statement but as a neighbourhood's declaration: we are here, we are together, we are equal.