“Auras de Guerra”. Interventionen im öffentlichen revolutionären Raum Nicaraguas.

“Auras de Guerra” (Kriegsschauplätze) Foto: Ernesto Salmeron

Ernesto Salmerón, geboren 1977, lebt und arbeitet in Nicaragua. Zahlreiche internationale Ausstellungen, darunter die 52. Biennale in Venedig 2007.

Als in Nicaragua die Revolution der Sandinisten gegen die Somoza-Diktatur begann, war Ernesto Salmerón gerade zwei Jahre alt. Als Dreizehnjähriger erlebte er die Wahlniederlage der einstigen Sieger. Heute versucht er die Vergangenheit aus den Spuren zu lesen, die sich der Gegenwart eingeprägt haben, und weiß: „Die Erinnerung ist ein Minenfeld“.

Mit seinem Projekt „Auras de Guerra“ „Kriegsschauplätze“ hinterfragt er die kollektive Erinnerung an die Sandinistische Revolution, konfrontiert sie in Bildern und Videos mit dem Heute. Er zeigt die Brüchigkeit von Erinnerungen und legt gleichzeitig die Fallen des Vergessens offen.
http://www.minoritenkulturgraz.at/2007_5/Salmeron.htm
http://www.kulturserver-graz.at/kalender/event/212222844
http://www.kleinezeitung.at/freizeit/events/db/showEvent_Detail?id=55371
http://www.kulturservice.steiermark.at/cms/beitrag/10846000/4467602/_2
http://veranstaltungen.kircheninfo.com/index.php/content/view/full/4315/(multiduration)/5298 

El Nuevo Diario. Managua, Nicaragua. 22 de diciembre de 2007.

La Nación. Costa Rica. 11 de nov 2007.
http://www.nacion.com/ln_ee/2007/noviembre/11/aldea1311798.html

Austria
http://www.minoritenkulturgraz.at/2007_5/Salmeron.htm
http://www.kulturserver-graz.at/kalender/event/212222844
http://www.kleinezeitung.at/freizeit/events/db/showEvent_Detail?id=55371
http://www.kulturservice.steiermark.at/cms/beitrag/10846000/4467602/_2
http://veranstaltungen.kircheninfo.com/index.php/content/view/full/4315/(multiduration)/5298

Ernesto Salmerón was two years old when the triumphant  “muchachos” entered Managua and thirteen when the Sandinistas lost the elections of  1990. He is a  “cachorro” .

The Auras of War project, of Nicaraguan artist Ernesto Salmerón, was initiated ten years ago, in 1996, while the artist still lived in Colombia and was studying Social Communication. His intention was to document the “Nicaraguan revolutionary public space”, a space situated in the memory of a possible future, an utopia, one for which he had been prepared, in which he was to participate.  However, we could say that the artist ends up assuming the position of a chronicler, recording instead the disappearance of that revolutionary space, witnessing the fading of hope in the wake of  general indifference, although paradoxically continuing to invoke utopia even in the horror of post war.  And so, voluntarily and consciously he surrenders to the traps of memory and the dangers of reminiscence as well as of oblivion. His final return to Nicaragua in 2003 is preceded by several visits on a specific date: the 19th of July.  From these occasions emerges initially a series of portraits realised over several years on that date, the anniversary of the Sandinista revolution. However, these photos are nothing of a celebration: Salmerón considers them as an expression of his own “outrage in front of the present indifference”.  They constitute a powerful essay that would have not been possible without the collaboration and complicity of the participants in the concentration at the plaza – these images are a sad metaphor of lost solidarity.

Salmerón’s first videos, of the series “29 Documents about the Revideolution in Nicaragua”, appear around 2002, and he founds E.V.I.L a bit later, the Latin American Video Army”, an independent video production project, organising workshops and bombarding through the web.   The Documents 1/29, 2/29 and 3/29 were produced using newsreel and visual archive material of the recent Nicaraguan history, inserting references and cuts in an apparently arbitrary way, to hinder its understanding, as an analogy to the misinformation effect around the pre- and most of all the post – revolutionary process.

The memory of the Sandinista revolution is sifted through a series of political sieves, both temporal and contextual ones; it is the incomplete reminiscence of an aborted process, and a life situation that ends by destabilising the very existence of the artist as a “puppy of the revolution” – Salmerón was brought up to defend it but never got to apprehend it. In a way this work also questions and reasserts at the same time his national belonging as a “son of Sandino”.  But of which Sandino? Just as Simón Bolívar, José Martí, Garibaldi and most of the historical figures that fought for a particular idea in specific circumstances in time and space, the figure of Sandino has been trampled and manipulated by posterity, and, as with others, been attributed ideologies and vocations according to political intentions of the moment, but that were rarely part of the original struggles. Where is Sandino?  Is it the trace, the  peeling image in “The Wall” that Ernesto Salmerón has taken to Venice?

In the beginning of “Tiempo Pasado” , an essay by Argentine scholar Beatriz Sarlo, the author cites Susan Sontag, in relation to memory and tought, when the latter insists on importance of understanding in the face of only remembering, while at the same time, in order to understand it is necessary to remember.   Sarlo’s approach to the topic seems to put forth the notion that memory is not intangible, and  as a response to this quite transgressing idea, the Costa Rican historian Victor Hugo Acuña noted that the past would be constituted then by a series of “objets trouvés”…  would these be those that support, that assert memory and make it tangible?  I am taken by this when approaching the project of “Sandino’s Wall”, that is, the recuperation of a fragment of adobe wall with a graffiti from the 80’s, and its following itinerance from Granada, Nicaragua to Managua, then to El Salvador, and now to the Arsenale in Venice. When preparing the loan form for the 2007 biennale, the artist asked himself what kind of work he was presenting: an installation, an action, a happening, social sculpture? Following Acuña’s idea, it would seem that this piece could be defined rather as a succession of found objects – the graffiti on the wall, the extracted  adobe fragment, the IFA military truck, part of a donation of the German Democratic Republic to Nicaragua during the same period, now recycled as a commercial vehicle, and finally “The Wall” in the back of the truck, showing a blurred graffiti of  Sandino that crumbles irremissibly in time, guarded by two demobilised, mutilated ex-militia members, a former Contra and a Sandinista soldier: this “macro-objet trouvé composé” becomes then a kind of tragic military funeral caravan for Sandino, betrayed once again by his own people.  And as the found object assumes a specific meaning by the very fact of entering the space of art, so this caravan awakens the memory of a people, and maybe through an analogy with the impossible, in a country immersed in pre-modernity, it confers “life to the hope of a positive collective thinking, a thought that (the artist) would like to see transcend the “national” to touch a larger sympathy base, the human one”

What is Salmerón aiming at with this piece?  The artist remains painfully aware of the impossibility of changing history, which will continue its course with or without him.  Although this piece functions by itself as a desire to recuperate the utopia of survival, and through the presence of two guards, formerly set against each other around 25 years ago, would seem to propose an encounter  of opponents, it also dramatically puts forth the consequences of wars and military conflicts, which inevitably cause misery and abandonment of the dispossessed, whether they belong to the winners or the losers.  However, instead of considering common misery as the sole meeting space, this is a tangible testimony that reaffirms the capacity of a more recent memory.  Attached to the complex Nicaraguan context, it transforms itself into a work of art within the very process the artist has lived as a document maker of personal experiences in front of the paradox, the absurd, the demobilised ones and the tensions between them, and is an austere but compelling register of a hallucinated journey on the central American roads.  Auras of War, an on-going project, is a deep and complex realisation that questions the Manichean interpretation of a unending historical process, and a first step in the re-building of a fragmented memory, an open proposal that takes the risk of  incompletion, that assumes its many silences, its many absences, its many interrogations.

Virginia Pérez-Ratton, may 2007

Photo by Ernesto Salmerón. Tokyo, Dec 2007.

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Eric Van Hove´s project to show in a Subway Station´s locker.

“Off the record” es un proyecto expositivo del artista Eric Van Hove en una estación de Metro de Tokio. La idea es usar un locker como galería invitando artistas. Se accede a él a través de una llamada desde un teléfono celular. Es un método usado recientemente en Tokyo para intercambiar cosas. Los espectadores pasarán el mensaje hasta que la cadena desaparezca.
http://www.transcri.be/projects/offtherecord.html

Photo by Oscar Navarrete. Managua 19th July, 2007.

“Did I find my enemy?”. Ernesto Salmerón. “Found Footage #5″

Eric Van Hove calling to start the chain.

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“Found Footage#5” is a project that started thanks to Oscar Navarrete, nicaraguan photographer that has been working since the 80´s, first as a “selfportrayer soldier” during the war, and now as a free lance international agency photographer. Oscar gave me a DVD full of imagenes from the first period of the new Sandinista Government in Nicaragua. I asked him for his pictures for many reasons: he has a prominent eye first, but also he´s daily taking pictures of everything that happens in Nicaragua, also he gives me what mass media do not want to publish from his work, and obviously he´s there while I´m abroad. His pictures allows me to understand the present of the Sandinista Revolution, and from that starting point I produce my art work in other different medias.

In this sense, “Found Footage #5” is an infinite knowlegde resourse for my work as an artist, and Navarrete´s photos are going to be shown as part of my research process. As a first stage for my artwork, I put poems from my notebook and Navarrete´s photos together, the written text in Tokyo was “Did I find my enemy?”.

“Repliege”, 2007. Photo by Oscar Navarrete.

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“Found Footage #5″ es un proyecto que nace gracias a Oscar Navarrete, fotógrafo nica que ha trabajado desde los 80´s en Nicaragua, primero como “cachorro” autoretratista y ahora como reportero gráfico para diferentes agencias internacionales y periódicos nicaragüenses. Oscar me entregó un DVD lleno de imágenes para entender el estado actual de la Revolución Sandinista. “Found Footage #5″ es una muestra infinita de las fotos de Navarrete, con textos de Ernesto Salmerón. La primera muestra se realizó en Graz, Austria, y ahora se muestra en Tokyo gracias a la invitación de Eric Van Hove.