Murales de Octubre: The unauthorized intervention of Adan Vallecillo and Leonardo Gonzales (Honduras)
Stefano Pasquini
In Nicaragua, a country at the very heart of Central America, a unique art event has recently become talk of the town. For roughly ten days last October, 16 artists met in Managua to change the face of Avenida Bolivar, the symbolic avenue of a city with a heavy past and uncertain future. The Avenida runs from the outskirts of Managua to the homonymous lake, past symbolic places of Nicaraguan society: the House of Parliament, the Government Palace, the Monumental Cemetery, ending at a military wall that was painted with a revolutionary mural called The Dream of Bolivar between 1980 and 1990.
A few years before the end of the revolution, Chilean painter Victor Canifrù, helped by his "brigada cilena," celebrated the hope of a Sandinista victory with a representation of the people’s defeat of the oppressor. The mural lasted ten years–through the toughest years of war–until 1990 when, without much ado, it was simply erased. It was covered, in an aesthetic moment of the new power’s impetus, with a tropical decoration–colorful rays without a specific reference. For a good deal of citizens, this erasure was an abuse that still smells of treason and sorrow for a lost memory.
The newest generation of Nicaraguans, not having experienced this moment nor the country’s age of civil war directly, would rather stop looking at the past and take a step towards the future of the nation. This was the intention of Alicia Zamora, a young sociologist and artist who gave life to this singular and provocative participatory project. With the logistic help of Italian curator Stefano Questioli, she invited a few national and international artists to work around that wall, which eventually the city council let free for the initiative.
With each day of renovation, the area began to take shape, under the increasing interest of passersby who watched the developments with enthusiasm and curiosity. The different sensibilities of the artists were displayed, side by side, in a colorful collage, eclectic and pleasurably loud: from the conceptual approach of Costarican artist Habacuc, to the engaged attitude of Nicaraguan Wilbert Carmona, to the "satellite" action of Oscar Ribas who transcribed on the wall its space coordinates.
Hugo Ochoa from Honduras left the tropical background of the wall and embellished it with his own particular little drawings, along with additions from the many niños de la calle who live on this popular street. And they actually did a pretty good job. From the graphic denunciation against the politics of power and oil of Zenelia Roiz and Oscar Garcia, both from Nicaragua, to the archaeological intervention of Alejandro Ramirez (Costa Rica) who subtly transformed muralism into a pandillera aesthetic experience, or José Osorio (Guatemala) who found under the black skin of the ancient wall a black divinity, sensual and magic–the wall continually reemerged from one world to dive into another. Errol Barrantes from Costa Rica built a visionary architectural space, whilst the updated graffiti of Dorian Serpa (Nicaragua) was capable of joining the fashionable icons of international spray can art with the intimate pulsations of the second-poorest American country. Traditional fresco painting dialogued with the past in the work of Alberto Torres-Serrato and Socrates Martinez (Nicaragua), and stood next to the intervention of two underground Italian street artists: Blu and Ericailcane.
These two Italians–I’m being patriotic here–deserve some special attention. Even though they were outsiders in the Latin American context, they set up a suggestive mise-en-scene inspired by the recent scandal of Nemagon. Nemagon is a poisonous fertilizer imposed by multinationals in the growing of bananas. The harmful agent polluted watercourses and fields, as well as endangering the health of many bananeros.
Blu and Ericailcane are used to working over European walls, intervening–abusively–at night, but in this particular case they took advantage of the heat of the subtropical sun to tell a provocative, yet visually lovely, story. The Hombre Banano, as the locals call it, throws his mutant bananas at a population of little warlike creatures. A whole industry transforms them into poisonous guns, which are then turned on the animals that try to resist with rough weapons such as bats, sticks and machetes. Unfortunately nobody knows how it will end.
Yet another meteorite hit the festival in the form of two Honduran artists, Adan Vallecillo and Leonardo Gonzales, who left their mark in the national press. Their submission portrayed–directly in front of the "shadow" monument to Sandino that faces Avenida Bolivar from a hill–a pink (the color of the renewed party) silhouette of the national hero, laying on his side. The artwork had a short life. Using the excuse that a sketch had not been presented beforehand, it was erased within three days, even though its echo is still resounding in the conscience of the citizens who are eager to open a critical dialogue with the symbols of their own country. When contemporary art comes down from the (palm) tree and gets tangled with daily life, things can get confrontational, and certainly more exciting.
Today, that long avenue tells new stories, almost as if Bolivar’s dream came true. For more info: www.muralesdeoctubre.com
