We are a bunch of ordinary people understanding that together we can achieve exponentially more than each of us on our own. It all started six years ago with a group of 18 people from 11 different nationalities from all different walks of life ranging from business executives to carpenters; from health professionals to service industry professionals - united by the fact that we loved art however never dared to call ourselves “artists”.

Despite this, we believed that while there may be things we cannot achieve alone, there is nothing we cannot achieve all together – thus Collective Art was born. Since our inception we have now created numerous events/festivals leading to the creation of large-scale sculptural installations - the most recent example being prototype for ‘Umbala’.

Simon, from Australia, is the Project Leader for all of Misfits Unified installations and sculpting & painting festivals. Although Simon was leading a successful career working as a management consultant for one of the worlds largest professional services firms, he felt strongly that he wanted to direct his energy and enthusiasm into creative pursuits.

Mikis, from Greece, is the old dog of the Misfits Unified team and the one that provided the inspiration for the collective art movement. They say you cannot teach an old dog new tricks however Mikis has been providing ideas and new tricks to the whole community since the beginning.

Jackie is a bubbly and inspired team leader for Misfits Unified Collective Art events. From a very young age she was exploring her creative side, mostly with abstract drawings in her school books, sharpie murals on her bedroom walls, or just putting acrylic to large canvas, art came naturally to her.

Adam, from the United States, is one of the team leaders for the Misfits Unified collective art events. He is a carpenter and commercial fisherman and has brought countless new skills and new techniques to the Misfits team, and has rightfully earned his his nickname- MacGyver.

At a young age Maja dreamed of being an artist as she explored the arts of sewing, pottery and painting. As she grew up and finished school however she stopped believing in her creativity and instead started travelling the world.

Lies is an experienced team leader for Misfits Unified's Collective Art events. She has always loved art since she was a little girl and attended Art Academy on Saturday mornings until the end of high school.

Mathilde was leading a successful career in France as a video editor for France’s leading news channel. As a talented video producer she enjoyed the challenge and status of working in the TV news environment however longed to explore her creativity at a deeper level.

Damien was drawn to many art forms and media from an early age and loves all things creative. As he grew up however, he struggled to hold momentum and follow through on many creative pursuits until joining in on Misfits Unified projects in 2018.

Andy, grew up in New Zealand believing that he was not an artistic person. His teachers told him he was a "math and science kid" and so he never really went for any art... until he met the team at Misfits Unified!

As a small child, Eli was a prolific crafter, surrounded by family painters and creatives but never fully believed she held a true creative force and instead pursued sport and her scientific studies.

Born in 1978, Sara had a career in France as an actress for theater, dreaming of collective creations and performances, and of finding people to share her voice and visions with.

As a child Dorin was fascinated with his father's paintings and drawings and remembered dreaming of one day following his footsteps.

Originally from New Zealand, Leroy joined the Misfits Unified team and Collective Art movement in November 2018 when he came for the first ever Misfits Unified Sculpting Extravaganza. Although Leroy is a qualified civil engineer he has discovered his true passion in creativity and art.

Leanne is a very fun and outgoing Australian who loved her color pens and color books as a little girl, always loving to fill in between the lines and make things pretty and colorful but did not pursue a life of art and color until joining the misfits.

Niloufar, from the United States, is a proud misfit who is a sculptor, painter, singer, song writer, dancer, and performer. When she first joined Misfits Unified her primary interest was to pursue song writing and performing.

The whole story started in January 2015. There were just 5-6 people living in TierraMitica, the birthplace of Misfits Unified. Inspired by TierraMitica’s transformational work on happiness and eager to contribute and be part of the research into humanity and what makes us tick. We were building TierraMitica from scratch, conducting our heavy-duty intensive life changing workshops and continuously researching and building our lives in the high jungle of Peru. We were low on money and resources, often our workshops would be undersubscribed, but we made up for this with love and enthusiasm for our calling. Despite our severely limited resources, we decided to build ourselves an art studio, in a spot high up the hill with a tremendous view of the mountains. An art studio for just 4-5 of us, when we had just constructed Casablanca, our community center and communal living room, a huge building that was perpetually empty! Were we nuts? Yes! But we were also inspired by our spectacular results in using painting and sculpting as a healing and exploration tool for ourselves and our guests, participants in our workshops.

In every single religion and spiritual practice the notion of the divine, god or anything you wish to call it is the notion of a creating force or entity, the creator. So, very simply put, creativity and creative energy is divine energy and we had discovered that when one accesses their creativity they actually access the most divine part inside them. We wanted to explore this in a dedicated and intense fashion, and if we were going to fail and close down anyway it wouldn’t make that much of a difference, but if we did not dare we would stagnate and we would not be embodying our own advice, to live big, mythic lives of daring and creativity, to trust ourselves and the universe and not live lives of anxiety and worry. So we built our art studio thinking “build it and they shall come”! We named it Chocopelli as a combo between Kokopelli, the ancient Hopi god of fertility, music and mischief, and chocolate, believed by indigenous people to be divine nourishment, and who can disagree with this! After all chocolate produces similar endorphins to an orgasm, how good can it get?

Since we completed the construction of Chocopelli right at the end of the year, and Mikis and Lis had decided to get married symbolically on the day of their common birthday of 20th January, we decided to combine celebrations with the inauguration of Chocopelli and the publishing of Mikis’ first book “A Mythic Voyage” and to hold an open party, inviting anyone that felt like joining us to come and celebrate with us, opening the doors to our jungle paradise TierraMitica to absolutely anybody that would show up for a five day free party. After all, the notion of the divine is also one of oneness, togetherness, union. We also decided to spice it up by inviting Luis Amasifuen Tamani, a young Peruvian visionary artist of extraordinary talent and a friend to paint a mural on one of the walls of the art studio during the event, while we all enjoyed his masterpiece come to life in front of our eyes day by day. Luis accepted with pleasure, but when we invited another great Peruvian visionary artist, Juan Carlos Taminchi, who also brought Julio Cabrera Suncion, a friend artist of his, there was a reaction from Luis. He was not used to painting with other people, being a dedicated workaholic painter spending unlimited hours a day improving his art. The objections quickly dissipated, each artist was given his own wall and the Mythic Party 1 was such an incredible event that we all decided on the spot to do it again next year, in a way more spectacular fashion. The three murals that just appeared in front of our eyes within a few days were true masterpieces, and the three artists had worked simultaneously but each one alone in their own inspiration bubble. Since the beginning of human civilization people have been painting murals on walls that were already there. First in prehistoric cave walls, then on temples, palaces, cathedrals, homes and public spaces.

We would build a custom-made building, La Astronave, the spaceship, and we would invite 20 artists from all over the world to paint on the walls of the spiral building, each one a frame of the myth of the Grandmother Ayahuasca as told by the tribes of the Ucayali river for thousands of years, each one painting a part of the myth, together creating the whole story. It was our first inspiration for collective art. During the Mythic Party 2, January 2016, we were determined to let each international artist to paint anyway they liked, to find their own expression and with their own style their interpretation of their vignette of the myth, but also to attempt to inspire them to meld the paintings together in one coherent whole, a collective painting comprising of their individual walls stretching over sixty meters from the outside walls, spiraling into the interior walls. We opened our doors again for a free five-day party to anyone who wanted to join in watching this time twenty murals being created in front of our eyes, this time not out of sight of one another as in the first Mythic Party, but right next to each other in one dedicated building made just to be painted: A monument to the Grandmother Ayahuasca, a feast of visionary art and a celebration of collectiveness and togetherness. This time we had about 55 guests all together, but now there were 7 of us and our community have grown so much closer. We stretched ourselves super thin, worked like maniacs and our bet paid off big time! Artists from different parts of the world started their individual walls, often judgmental or annoyed by other artists styles or capabilities but they ended up inviting each other to paint on their walls, collaborating in breaking the rigid lines and melding all paintings into one, continuous collective masterpiece, and the rest of us observed the magic all day and jammed together around the fire every night. There were some issues with some serial complainers at first, who were not understanding that we were offering free food, accommodation, paints materials and our 24 hour a day work for over 60 people in a small place with few resources. But togetherness won, and by the end of the event we all felt that we had lived a unique, unheard of magical experience.
We were hooked and we decided to go even further with this.

Elated by the magic, seeing in front of our eyes how usually individualistic artists opened up to collaboration, we decided to build walls big enough for 120 murals, the walls forming a giant baby figure that would be big enough to be viewed from space and we would try to get to TierraMitica 40 visionary artists every year and finish the project within three years in parts, creating a whole plaza full of flowers and beauty in celebration of human creativity, art and togetherness in the process. We drew 3D plans and even made a scale model of “La Cuna” (the Cradle or Origin), our planned collective art plaza. This never happened, simply because we ran out of resources, but like always every obstacle is exactly as it should be, a new opportunity. Instead, we chose to construct a 20ft giant sculpture of a pregnant mother earth goddess, La Mama. She was embellished by smaller sculptures of birds, animals, insects and flowers. The sculpture includes a chamber in the belly where two people could lie down and experience the womb sensation, inclusive of recorded womb sounds on a sound system and UV lights, with a blue light on her forehead. Mythic Party 3, La mama was on!

None of us had any idea how to do this, but we were getting bolder and bolder. After a series of misadventures, we, the TierraMiticans, a bunch of misfits with no idea what we were doing and just our passion to drive us, completed the huge sculpture in just 80 days from scratch, inclusive of weeks off for workshops or rainy weather. Made of metal and concrete, she sat proudly in the lotus position to be painted once more by visiting artists and guests. But this time we all painted as well, no longer observers. Each night we would all come together to discuss the direction of the painting for the next day, projecting pictures of the progress and joining everybody’s inspiration and every day we would each paint what we chose but also helped each other, taught each other until within just five days she emerged glorious, a true product of collective art. By now, we were hooked! Not only us, but our guests as well, ordinary people of all ages and countries and visiting artists alike. It was a totally different experience; Collective Art was being born, and each one of us experienced equal collective pride and ownership of the result. All five visiting Peruvian visionary artists from the previous Mythic Party vowed to return in a year, enthused about the possibilities that working collectively brought. So enthused, in fact, that the following year, for the Mythic Party 4, 20 of them came, excited by the sparkle in their colleague’s eyes. La Mente – Concepción (The Mind – Conception) is ready. A whole building this time, of a giant sculpted brain itself covered with sculptures of conception, from the thought to the dream to the animalistic instinct and from the sperm to the creation of new life, is housing inside a whole recording studio for Wet Pussy Productions, the recording of our songs, written and performed by the same bunch of misfits. It has been made and sculpted by each and every one of us, 15 misfits in all to a whole different level and speed than La Mama. It took about 3 months to build and is not only many times the size of La Mama and a fully functioning building with toilet, storage room, foyer, recording studio and control booth but also holds many intricate sculptures all over it, each one the collective work of many. This time it was not “you do the face I will do the hand and she will do a butterfly on her shoulder” kind of thing. This time we fully melded, multiple people cooperated on each sculpture, each area, each face and each detail as well as the continuously evolving vision of the whole. This time different people would work on the same area at different times, each one would contribute to the vision and each one of us is equally proud of each detail on this amazing functional monument. The level of sculpting rose exponentially in every single one of us, elevating us and enabling us to do complex, ambitious sculptures in mere days. And this time we all painted collectively, as one, forming our collective vision as we went along, jamming and making music in the nights creating just one big work of art, each one of the 42 participants with equal authorship and right to pride over the final result. There was be no piece that was disconnected and personal. Artists and “non-artists” (people that had not delved in art since school) working together as one, working on each other’s pieces, every single participant welcoming the collective interventions, dancing, laughing, playing, inspired and joyful. The event was a huge universal success! Human divinity, uniting ourselves and our creativity in one force.

The following year, for the Mythic Party 5, we went even further and not just in scale, complexity and creativity but also in collectiveness. Having turned Plaza La Cuna into an area of celebration of collective art and life itself, we decided to build an 120-140 seat amphitheater in the shape of a giant broken egg. The narrow end of the egg (the stage area) is devoted to ‘birth’ with newborn baby animals sculpted in relief to the left and right of the stage, with the eggshell overhead supporting a sculpture of a giant new-born; and the wide part of the egg (the seating area) devoted to ‘adolescence’. With our ambition of diving deeper into collective art, this time around TierraMitica opened its arms and its doors to the public to participate in the first ever month-long sculpting Extravaganza. The exterior walls of the wide end of the egg was a clean canvass for the 38 participants of the sculpting Extravaganza to share in inspiration and collective envision and create a total of 8 separate, yet connected scenes to represent the experience of adolescence.
Again we completed it in just a few months with the limited means of the jungle, hand mixing every ounce of cement, and again we painted it all together during our annual free Mythic Party.

The first Extravaganza was such a spectacular success that we immediately decided to organize a second edition in 2019, this time to sculpt the various scenes and continents that make up “Umbala!”, a first of its kind fully sculpted and interactive adventure playground for kids and adults and a prototype for playgrounds to be built by Misfits Unified all over the world. Umbala! is a result of not only the creativity, skill and enthusiasm that the Misfits Unified team had built over the years but a true testament to the beauty of collective art as ever-growing numbers of strangers showed up to the Sculpting Extravaganza and the Mythic Party and would find themselves swept up in the magic of the collectivity, creativity and one-ness that they experienced in our collective art events. Artists and non-artists alike, sculpting and painting side-by-side and sharing in skill, craft and inspiration in an event like no other than they experienced. Umbala! is what Misfits Unified has to offer the world, it is not only a unique adventure playground, playable like a board game, it is also not only an amazing opportunity for city or community to display as public art but it is a truly unique opportunity for people to unite in creativity and feel the pride of being an integral part of a magnificent creation for their community.

Since the creation of Umbala! Misfits Unified have been pushing the boundaries year-after-year  and continue to create amazing works of art such as our jungle book temple ruins, our yellow submarine and the amazing murals painted on the walls of the bungalows of Pueblo Colorado. See our projects page for info and photos of our projects completed so far.

The art of Misfits Unified, Collective Art, is a new and revolutionary way of creating spectacular public works of art. It is revolutionary because unlike any other form of art, its essential ingredient is the conglomeration of vision, inspiration and craft of everybody involved, irrespective of whether they are a seasoned artist or if this is the very first time doing any form of art – and the result is a spectacular art installation that every participant can feel equal pride, contribution and achievement. Not only do Collective Art projects enable members of your community, company, school or university to be central to the conception and the creation of a spectacular art installation, it is also a live show for onlookers to observe and witness as magic unfolds before their eyes for the duration of the project. We passionately believe that Collective Art is not only a new, revolutionary form of art that has never truly existed before, but also a new way to unite us and bring us closer as human beings.

Why do we say it has never existed before? History is full of giant artistic endeavors, like cathedrals such as the Duomo in Milan or Gaudi’s Sagrada Familia in Barcelona, giant statues such as the Spring Temple of Buddha in China standing 128 meters tall (as tall as a 40 story skyscraper) or the Laykun Setkyar Buddha statue in Myanmar and the Sphinx in Egypt, requiring often hundreds or even tens of thousands of builders, sculptors and painters to execute one man’s vision. But this is not true collective art, because it involves workers and artists just executing, not envisioning, not creating, working under specific direction. Then there are the giant, ephemeral constructions in festivals such as Burning Man, again with various people collaborating but under direction of one or two people’s visions and within specific restraints of the original design. Although often they have the opportunity to add personal touches to the whole, they are mainly executors and assemblers. You also have the multitude of murals on the Berlin wall and various neighborhoods worldwide; but each mural is a personal, individual expression.

True collective art exists, and it is actually quite widespread. Where? In kindergartens, elementary schools, some all the way to the first years of secondary school. If you google collective art, you will find art collectives, groups of people collaborating each with their personal, individual work for economic or practical reasons and things little children are taught to do by their teachers. And kids love it! What happens to us and we lose the joy of working together and making cool things? What do we lose when we grow older that makes us incapable of really enjoying art, working together, no ego or possessiveness involved?

But most importantly, how do we get it back? And how do we stimulate other people to get it back as well? Well, Misfits Unified are up for hire! We will be creating fully sculpted and unique amphitheaters, playgrounds and other public functional sculptures for cities, schools, universities, private companies and communities around the world at a fraction of the cost and the time usually required, with a unique twist:Every build will be a festival and live show of collective art, inviting every single member of the community or facility to join us in the sculpting and the painting, teaching them in the process and spreading collective pride around the world! Each build will be a free event for whoever wishes to join us and experience the beauty of collective art and a free training course in sculpting and painting, changing the face of public art in the process and empowering all the “misfits”, ordinary people and artists alike to unify in a common, collective, functional giant sculpture.

Who is part of Misfits Unified? Everyone that so chooses! Join us!