Actions. Situations. Possible Scenarios

Zigzagging through personal memory and historical episodes of great consequence – the fall of the Berlin wall, the Romanian revolution and the April 2018 protests in Nicaragua – the essay seeks points of connection between the personal and the political, exploring how the two are intimately and inextricably intertwined. The textual approach can be situated in-between historical analysis and auto-biographical fiction; the aim is to enable multi-layered narratives, and contrasting, conflicting temporalities to co-exist. Illustrative of this intent, Romanian artist Călin Man intervenes upon the more well-known documentary photographs referenced in the text, by conflating them with everyday snapshots from the city of Arad taken at different points along the temporal arc described

Women’s Work: Photographers of the Sandinista Revolution

This article focuses on the early careers of Margarita Montealegre and Claudia Gordillo, both of whom produced substantial photographic documentation of Nicaragua during the Sandinista Revolution (1978–1990). Working around the ideological strictures of that moment, I propose reading their work against inherited notions on how political imagery should operate in a revolutionary context. Rejecting the demand for sensationalist images, Montealegre and Gordillo turned their gaze toward fellow citizens, using the camera as a means to observe Nicaraguan society up-close. Aesthetically and politically, each pursued different, yet intersecting directions in their work, exploring how revolutionary ideals, and social change intertwined. The Revolution marked a moment of profound historic change, whereby identities were shaped and political imaginaries formed in ways that remain consequential to date. Revisiting these photographers’ archives now, across the span of four decades, reveals previously overlooked contingent details and an ample range of interpretative possibilities

Vandalism as Symbolic Reparation

The 2018 anti-government protests in Nicaragua generated a vast amount of photographic imagery, video documentation, and visual graphics. On the street and via social media, everyday citizens engaged with this material, activating a multisensory environment. The production of visual content was nonetheless accompanied by iconoclastic gestures; vandalism became a means of reclaiming Nicaragua’s revolutionary past and its symbols, while deploying them towards the making of a yet to be imagined political future. Drawing on examples from Chile and Mexico, the article argues that acts of vandalism may be understood as symbolically reparative. The materiality of the protests, manifested through image, trace, gesture, and sound (slogans, chants, noise) becomes a means towards analysing, ethnographically, revolutionary imaginaries caught within the flux of an unsettled present

Incident Transgressions: A Review of Transmissions: Art in Eastern Europe and Latin America, 1960–1980, MOMA

By placing on view a large selection of objects recently acquired by the New York Museum of Modern Art, the exhibition Incident Transgressions: Report on “Transmissions: Art in Eastern Europe and Latin America 1960–1980” (September 5, 2015 to January 3, 2016) sought to situate artistic practices from Latin America and Eastern Europe within a discursive model of cross-cultural and aesthetic transmission. However, the exhibition marginalized an account of the specific relations between these objects in favor of a more encompassing global curatorial narrative. While seeking to outline the parameters of the exhibition, and its implications in regard to contemporary trends in art history and museology, the text aims to highlight some of the instances of transmission and contact, both real and imagined, between the objects displayed