(image by Pedro Molina)
A dead, embalmed grandmother
The revolution is an anvil. I feel it everywhere, like a dead, embalmed grandmother. The revolution fastened itself with a death force so vulgarly fascist, and left us decidedly without hope. I have several works about the revolution—they are an eternal and sorrowful mockery of the revolution and of myself, a daughter of the revolution. I’ve shown them in other countries, outside Nicaragua. As Didi-Huberman wrote about Farocki, it’s easier to view them “in the context of a pacified art history than in the context of a political history in flames”. We, the children of the revolution, are experts at feigning madness, acting normal amid atrocity, masters of self-censorship. Speaking with a foreign curator, dressed in linen, sweating under the heat of Managua, understanding the NO that’s never spoken. Knowing that “harmless” young people show up to the exhibition while we’re still setting up because they’re government agents checking that everything is “fine.” And everything is fine, because we wear an assumed mask, almost since ancestral times. Watching the young curator, a friend, supposedly different, also sift through the work with tweezers, looking for what’s not “blatantly political.” Most of my works about the revolution are still in my head, waiting to come out. Self-censorship walks with me like the embalmed grandmother. Now that fascism settles into other latitudes, with a similar vulgar force of death, I almost feel fortunate to come from where I come from, and to know—like the superheroes—how to wear a mask to create and resist.
-Milena Garcia
The FSLN or Sandinista Front overthrew Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza in 1979. Sadly, former revolutionary guerrilla leader Daniel Ortega has morphed into an authoritarian “president for life” who carries out violent campaigns against anti-government protesters, restricting civil liberties and banishing opponents. Molina’s cartoon visualizes that dreadful transformation.
-The Editors
