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

“El Muro” (The Wall). Granada, Nicaragua. 2006.

Broadcasting from nicaraguan news channel 10.

Emisión del Canal 10 de noticias en Nicaragua.

Ferri boat named “Augusto” took into “El Arsenale” the IFA truck “El Gringo” carriying “El Muro” with the smashed graffiti of latin american guerrilla icon Augusto C. Sandino.

El ferri “Augusto” llevó hasta “El Arsenale” al camión IFA “El Gringo” cargando en su interior “El Muro” con el graffiti del desbaratado ícono guerrillero latinoamericano Augusto C. Sandino.

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“El Arsenale” while “El Gringo” was waiting for his final spot.

“El Arsenale” mientras “El Gringo” esperaba ser ubicado en su espacio final.

prostituted utopia

individual political strategies

great political reality shows

dismantle it

with

same ideological media strategies that were used

for the invention of the revolution

Think with the senses

Feel with the mind

Art in the present time

(Meeting with War Veterans Group, in Mercado Roberto Huembes, Managua. The two veterans that worked with Auras of War project, are part of this cooperative. Photo: Ernesto Salmerón. )

This Project researches the damage produced by a social-revolutionary assistance that was not able to sustain the collective project of solidarity in Nicaragua seen from inside and out. Auras of War puts forward, through an installation and a simultaneous performance, a way of maintaining human contact from an individual perspective, and finds viable means of mutual exchange between people.

The Auras of War project works directly with a group of war veterans searching for ways of reaching the acknowledgment they disserve and expose the need to generate employment for people within this postwar society, who are treated as objects of use and waste.

Pieces of the Project

1.”The Wall”: extracted from a Colonial house in Granada, Nicaragua, with the graffiti image of a smashed national hero Augusto C. Sandino (2 tons of weight, 1.5 meters x 1m x 0.30 m).

2. “El Gringo”: IFA truck made in the ex Democratic Republic of Germany, shipped to Nicaragua as part of the solidarity agreements with the ex socialist block. The IFA trucks were used during the war to transport soldiers to the fire front.

3. “Desmovilizado” (performance): Two disabled war veterans, one from the Sandinista Army, and one from the Contra Army. The uncertainties of war are performed lively by Don Rigoberto López Pérez (Ex Contra soldier) and Adolfo Palma Castro (Ex Sandinista soldier).

Forces they could not control pulled them to armed confrontations they are not able to explain. Don Rigo looked for a job as a janitor and was forced to enlist into the Guardia National Guard for the Somoza dynasty. Adolfo participated in different insurrections in the West of the Country for the FSLN, where he lost his right arm. They both work in a little group of veterans in Managua.

Exhibit

The project is intended as an installation of the IFA truck “El Gringo” and “The Wall” of Sandino, also with the performance “Desmovilizado” of two war veterans as sentries of the Latin-American revolutionary icon of Sandino.

The public of the 52nd Venice Biennale will be confronted to a piece about the post-war and the stage of a diluted revolution with no clear replies in the actual Nicaraguan society.

“The Wall” is exhibited inside the truck itself, and as an interaction with the truck, people will have to go inside to look at The Wall. The truck and The Wall will stay for the rest of the biennale. The war veteran’s performance will take place only during the opening days; documentation will remain as part of the installation for the rest of the biennale.

Ernesto Salmerón.

Feb 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

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.