“En IFA a Venecia”. Titular de la Revista Magazine #81, editada por La Prensa en Nicaragua. Trabajador de importadora de repuestos automotrices, despues de conseguir llantas “nuevas” para El Gringo. Managua, abril 2007.
Started in 2003 as a free community of video makers that wanted to produce and distribute alternative video works aside from the mass media agenda. In 2004 we made the first Video Workshop in Managua providing young enthusiasts, creative and technology tools to produce short experimental videos. From that workshop we finished producing eight videoarts and we screened them with other works of professional videoartists from Nicaragua and Colombia. We rent a local porn cinema called Cine July. The screening was successfull, it was the first time that a videoart public screening took place in Nicaragua.
After the first experience we organized more workshops (Documentary Photography for Video in 2005, and Sound for Video on 2006) that were taken by more young people that feels the lack of this kind of educational options in their Universities.
New screenings were made on the Cine July (“Homage to Cartier-Bresson” and “The Unknown Soldier” 2005) and we started to had works from different parts of Central America. At this moment E.V.I.L is a refference on Latin American Video production, having screened on global events as Tester (www.e-tester.net) or in institutions as the Contemporary Art and Design Museum of Costa Rica (www.madc.ac.cr) among others. Information of E.V.I.L activities can be reached at www.ernestosalmeron.com or at www.marcaacme.com
http://www.marcaacme.com/noticia.php?id=357
E.V.I.L agradece la participación de Lucho Fuentes, legendario cineasta y gran sonidista nica-tico, Lucho compartió su experiencia con los estudiantes, desde el punto de vista de quien practica a diario el oficio de sonidista.\
Ricardo Wheelock y Ernesto Salmerón con los estudiantes.
Esta serie de fotografías fue encargada en uno de los estudios fotográficos más respetados de Managua: la Foto Lumington, ubicada en el Barrio de Monseñor Lezcano. El trabajo consistió en encargar al estudio una serie de retratos de mi familia. Cada miembro de la familia posó con elementos que, según yo, los caracterizaban en ese momento de sus vidas. El resultado no gustó mucho a los retratados. Los miembros de la familia que no estaban en el pais no aparecieron. Ernesto Salmerón.
PostArt
AURAS OF WAR: PUBLIC INTERVENTIONS IN THE NICARAGUAN REVOLUTIONARY PUBLIC SPACE. 1996-2006.
This picture is the first encounter as a photographer with the image of Sandino in 1996. The place was an hold house near the market in Granada, Nicaragua. The house is surrounded by prostittution and small drug markets. For me the graffity was perfect, because Sandino did not have a face. This image would become the icon of my work: I used it as a photograph at first (1996-2003), then as a poster (2004 in the 25th aniversary of the Sandinista Revolution), and then as the presentation of THE THING: The Wall (2006).
Metal plate (2004) of the reproduction process for the 25th aniversary posters. This was the image on one side of the poster, the other side was the series of portraits that I made on the year 2000 on the 19th of july.
The poster got opposite opinions from the people who was at the celebration, some hated and some love it. The problem was about some texts on the posters as: “portraits made on the ex-plaza of the Revolution” and “25th aniversary edition. Auras of War.” People from the Sandinista’s Party surrounded my car and wanted to destroy the posters before we can distributte them among the people who where at the Cathedral and in the Juan Pablo II Plaza.
Then I was invited to the II Prague Biennale on 2005 and I took Sandino to the streets of Prague. I left the show with the pictures of the places where the poster was left, and this text on the wall of the biennale: “Checoslovaquia helped the nicaraguan revolution but they forgot to tell us how to manage the failure”.
In 2006 I needed to PRESENT what I was REPRESENTING, so I decided to cut the Wall of the house of Granada. I had ten years of not knowing exactly where I took that picture of the smashed Sandino. I went looking for it and I found that the house was from my grandmother, and that my father lived there when he was waiting to get older enough to go to school. So, too much coincidences made me take the final decision, I called two architects friend of mine, Oscar Rivas and Jennifer Sevilla, and they came with an engineer, Mario Sevilla. They said it was possible to cut the wall were Sandino was.
For the engineering work, that took 3-4 months, I hired two disable war veterans to stay with Sandino, day and night. So I ended working with great people, Don Rigoberto López Mejía, Adolfo Palma and David Davila. They were fighting on the war of the eighties, in opposite armys (La Contra vs the Sandinista Army). This meeting was the performance called “Desmovilizado” that I had enjoyed most.
The project went to the National Palace of Culture in Managua, the same place were the Legislative Parlament took place on the Somoza Dictatoship era. We took The Wall there and all the photographic and video work that I had been doing in the last 10 years for Auras of War. The director of the Nicaraguan Cultural Institute closed the show the very day of the opening because he said it was political propaganda.
On november 2006 we went to the V Central American Biennal with The Wall (1rst prize). We travelled by ground with the piece and with the war veterans of Desmovilizados. The trip was made on the IFA truck called “El Gringo” made on the extinguish Democratic Republic of Germany (RDA). This kind of trucks were sended from the Socialist world wing to Nicaragua as part of the solidarity of those cold war days. All soldiers went to war on this IFA trucks.
Now I’m still working with the war veterans, and we are planning a couple of things together: their work facilities and fares, or a flat tire workshop.
Ernesto Salmerón / December 2006.
“Faggot!! you went from the Mountain to the Museum. BLI (Batallón de Lucha Irregular)”. / Museum of Contemporary Art and Design. San José, Costa Rica. 2006.
About my art practice. Ernesto Salmerón.
Real things. Real people. “REAL” being what gets inside people’s minds and bodies after they’ve been exposed to what they don’t have under control. People involved with the forces of the unpredictible. People like me, whose life processes begin when they come into contact with Others. And Others have lived unfortunate facts that have made their lives a lesson for my life. Questionable facts framed in a so-called HISTORY. But History forgets about people when they’re Others. History deals only with winners, and winners aren’t really people, they’re icons, constructed to personalize abstract evil behaviors. Icons belong to the market of ideas.
My social position as a winner, as a privileged person in an enviroment of widespread lack, became the motive for my work. I wanted to start a relationship with Others, in some cases the war veterans, the relatives of war veterans, the losers of the utopia were I grew up: the Sandinista Revolution in Nicaragua.
I began working as a photographer back in 1996 during my first year of university in Cali, Colombia. I was interested in documenting what was left of the Sandinista Revolution, and what was left of that “nicaraguan” culture that was gradually being erased by the forces of global culture.
Each year, during my vacation from university, I would travel to Nicaragua to document the anniversary of the triumph of Sandinista Revo1ution, celebrated on the 19th of July since 1979. I began accumulating portraits of people participating in this melancholy celebration. Inspired by the improvised, curtained mobile photo studios found in many Latinamerican smalltown fairs, I eventually built my own photo backdrop and began taking people’s portraits inside them.
I grew up in the social laboratory that Nicaragua was during the eighties. In school, I was taught how to read with revolutionary sentences like “Pedro fights for his country’s dignity”. My father decided to stay in Nicaragua, despite the fact that he worked for neither the Sandinistas nor the Contras. So my family lived the insurrection, the war and the postwar in Nicaragua. “So you want to play baseball?” my father asked me. “Ok, I’ll take you to where real baseball is played”. So he took me to the working class little leagues, where the “poor” kids played the best ball game. Suddenly, I was in a “real” baseball team, where my teammates didn’t eat breakfast before the ball game. They didn’t have uniforms, didn’t have gloves or cleats. They were still the best, without all the equipment that I saw on TV. So I started trying to be like them. My life was baseball and my friends didn’t live in my neighborhood. I began to understand that what I have is not necessary what everybody has. I took conscience that there is few for everybody, but you could share and feel that there was enough. “Hey, go to Ernesto’s house!! You’ll eat three times a day”, said our baseball manager to a pitcher that had trouble commuting to practice every day. He didn’t answer, but he did come to spend a few days at home with my family. He didn’t know how to use the toilet, and never talked too much.
An old musician in a village party once said to me, “The important thing is the bird, not the cage”.
December 2006.
Text editing and translation by Jonathan Harker.