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War in paradise: Solentiname and the Sandinista
revolution
Ileana L. Selej an
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Vol. 30, No. 2, 151–165, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1472586X.2015.1024961
War in paradise: Solentiname and the Sandinista revolution
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ILEANA L. SELEJAN
This article presents a case study of the Solentiname
archipelago in Nicaragua theorised as a site for the
construction of utopia, an idealised environment where
an alternative community was formed during the 1960s
and 1970s, in opposition to the Somoza dictatorship
(1936–79). The leadership of Ernesto Cardenal led to the
creation of an enduring cultural legacy, which was
essential to the development of the Sandinista
revolutionary movement as well as to sustaining the
Sandinista government following the victory in July 1979,
particularly during the Contra War (1981–90). Applying
art historical analysis, the article investigates how
photography contributes to the formation of
revolutionary identities, by fulfilling both descriptive and
ideological purposes. Despite the scarcity of the surviving
visual record from the islands, I argue that photographs
of the site were fundamental in establishing the role of the
community as a strategic ally for the rising opposition
against the Somoza dictatorship. Not only did
photography help envision utopia, it equally contributed
to situating these hopes in the context of daily realities,
resisting the regime. Other forms of art and literature that
developed in Solentiname in the years leading up to the
Revolution of 1978–79 further shaped revolutionary
identities, as grievances about poverty, inequality and
political repression were expressed through egalitarian
high–low aesthetics. The case of Solentiname thus serves
to open a discussion concerning under-explored cultural
alliances within Latin America and beyond, providing a
close-up view of localised aesthetic practices seen in
relation to transnational solidarity networks, framed by
the context of the massive sociopolitical transformations
underway during the Cold War.
REVOLUTIONARY AESTHETICS
Largely forgotten now, Solentiname – the place, the
name – once resonated with revolutionary idealism. It
was here in 1966, motivated by the promises of the
precepts of liberation theology, that Catholic priest,
literary and political figure, Ernesto Cardenal, together
with a group of like-minded artists and poets,
established a utopian community to escape and resist the
Somoza dictatorship (1937–79).1 An archipelago of 36
tropical islands located towards the south-eastern shores
of Lake Nicaragua, remote and independent from the
rest of the country, with its own school of primitivista
painting and sculpture, the community was a place of
refuge for Latin American revolutionaries, artists and
intellectuals in the years leading up to the Revolution of
1978–79. As utopian experiment, realised even if on a
small scale, Solentiname defied its exceptional status,
driven by transnational imaginaries of resistance and
hope. Its name was whispered by the anti-Somoza
resistance within and outside of Nicaragua, fuelling
future political and social alternatives even as a common
revolutionary movement was yet to take shape.
Originally intended to maintain a nucleus of peaceful
resistance under the leadership of Cardenal, the
community participated in the Sandinista-led insurgency
during the 1977 campaign against the National Guard.
After the end of the Somoza dictatorship and
throughout the 1980s, Solentiname remained an
important centre for arts and crafts production, with
artisans continuing to work in the naïve manner
introduced during the earlier period. Recreated through
folklore, this vision of the islands as an egalitarian
earthly paradise was nonetheless already nostalgic and
mythologised. This article proposes a reading of the site
as an experiment in culture and society, one that
provided an important model for social revolution and
emancipation through art and literature in Nicaragua in
the years following the Sandinista Revolution.
Within the coordinates of greater post-war cultures of
dissent, Solentiname must be seen in dialogue with
analogous progressive utopian projects from the 1960s
and 1970s, particularly those that incorporated the
production of art as a necessary component in their
proposed ecologies of change. As Jean Franco (2002, 113)
has noted: ‘Solentiname was intended as the culmination
of the historical avant-garde’s dream of fusing art and
everyday life, while reflecting at the same time liberation
theology’s view of the poor as the agents of history’. Yet
while some of these movements have been prominently
documented and archived – a prime reference here would
be the events around 1968 throughout the United States
(US), as well as in Paris, Prague and Mexico City – others,
Ileana L. Selejan is the Linda Wyatt Gruber ‘66 Curatorial Fellow in Photography, at The Davis Museum at Wellesley College. She received her PhD in Art
History from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University.
© 2015 International Visual Sociology Association
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152
I. L. Selejan
as the example of Solentiname shows, stand out not only
because of their singularity, but also due to their
fragmented historical record, failing to register long-term
beyond the sphere of national or local memory. As the
editors of this volume indicate, the persistence of certain
iconic photographs over the ‘mass’ of all others, while
illustrative of Cold War conflicts and ideologies, has often
led to the clouding of a greater range of visual cultural
materials, establishing dominant discourses dismissive of
seemingly ‘peripheral’ histories such as Solentiname.
Connected through vast networks of revolutionary
writers, artists and intellectuals, the ideologies introduced
to the islands by Cardenal and his group led to the
formation of novel sociopolitical categories, impossible to
achieve otherwise under an authoritarian gaze,
establishing trends that were both specific to the
Nicaraguan context and symptomatic of the broader
political climate of the time. In fact, important parallels
emerge beyond Central and South America with the
economically and politically aligned Third World, from
Eastern Europe to the Middle East. These ideological and
cultural ties – indeed ‘visual alignments’ – were forged in
reaction to authoritarian regimes, later to crystallise
through diplomacy into multifaceted Cold War
international relations.
The formation of Solentiname during the 1960s and
1970s directly influenced the policies promoted by
Cardenal during his tenure as Nicaraguan Minister of
Culture between 1979 and 1988. Begun as an incursion
into utopian life and thought, and as alternative to an
existence regulated by the overarching strictures of a
dictatorial regime, Paradise – embodied and imagined,
secular and devout – was fundamental to the nationbuilding programme of liberated Nicaragua. It was also
crucial to the resurrection of artistic production and of
cultural institutions and related educational
programmes. Government support for the arts, for
instance, was redesigned through an integrative
institutional model, inclusive of folk arts and crafts
traditions, which were intended to actively engage the
indigenous, pre-Columbian past alongside the
contemporary ethnic diversity of the region. Analysed
from an historical perspective, Solentiname provides an
important case study for understanding the development
of the ideological roots underlying the production of
material and visual culture in revolutionary Nicaragua.
Indeed, Cardenal’s phrase, ‘la revolución es cultura y la
cultura es revolución’ (‘culture is revolution, and
revolution is culture’) resonates throughout the pages of
this article (Cardenal et al. 2009, 64).
The majority of the literature on Solentiname dates to the
1980s, a decade that saw the international recognition of
Nicaraguan programmes for cultural renewal, education
and social rehabilitation, and concomitantly the rise of a
movement of international solidarity with the Sandinista
government. The latter was the outcome of a series of
interrelated political, economic and humanitarian crises,
as Nicaragua became caught in the midst of a violent USsupported counter-revolutionary struggle, the Contra
War (1981–90). As a consequence, impacted by the grave
human rights concerns brought about by a decade of
conflict and civil war affecting the greater Central
American region, a majority of these studies reflect the
polarised rhetoric of the era.2
Building on these studies, the present article focuses on
the entanglement of photography within the formation
of revolutionary, aesthetic identities that accompanied
the rise of the Sandinista National Liberation Front
(Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional) during the
1970s through to the 1980s. Several photographers
visited the archipelago during the period under
consideration, yet only two – Sandra Eleta and Larry
Towell – created bodies of work that are substantial
enough to yield significant reflections when placed
under the art historian’s loupe. As their accounts show,
within the context of Solentiname, photography
functioned primarily as an observational device,
witnessing the progressive social movements active
there, and later the Contra war. The analysis of this
fragmentary record will be supplemented by other types
of aesthetic evidence, forms of artistic practice which, I
will argue, took on documentary functions, relegating
photography to more prescribed illustrative purposes.
While the task of the ‘documentarian’ may have largely
been transferred to the poets and artists in the
community (which helps explain the minimal trace
Solentiname has left in the visual historical record), this
did not preclude the participation of photographers in
the creation of revolutionary aesthetics. Furthermore, as
demonstrated by examples of prose written by Julio
Cortázar in solidarity with the Sandinista Revolution,
neither were related non-fictional, descriptive or
reportorial literary forms, entirely devoid of visionary or
symbolic meaning.
ART AND CULTURE IN SOLENTINAME
Solentiname was strategically located along Nicaragua’s
southern border, overlooking sparsely populated areas,
landscapes where the dense tropical vegetation was
prone to disguise and overtake human presence. The
sublime landscape appealed to Cardenal, leading him to
establish a contemplative Catholic community on Isla
Mancarrón, the archipelago’s largest island in 1966.3 The
island’s population amounted to around 800 inhabitants
War in paradise
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at the time, comprising families of campesinos (or
peasants) farmers and fishermen with little access to
education and health services, almost entirely dependent
on the lake’s ecosystem for their daily subsistence. The
town of San Carlos, located at the confluence of the lake
and the San Juan River, reachable by boat within a few
hours, was the nearest point of connection to the rest of
the country.
Cardenal (born 1925) was an unusual cleric, a poet and
an intellectual, educated in Mexico, Colombia and in the
US. Drawn to theology, literature and philosophy from
an early age, he travelled widely through North and
South America and Europe. A stark opponent of the
Somoza regime, he first became involved with the
resistance during an April 1954 attempt to assassinate
President Anastasio (‘Tacho’) Somoza García.4 His
political engagement began to converge with his spiritual
education when, between 1957 and 1959, he became a
novice at the Trappist Abbey of Gethsemani in
Kentucky, under the mentorship of Thomas Merton. A
teacher of mystical theology, greatly influenced by nonWestern religions, ranging from Buddhism to Hinduism
and Sufism, Merton took on an increasingly progressive,
activist stance on civil rights, non-violent protest and
social emancipation through spirituality.
The two maintained regular correspondence until
Merton’s death in 1968, with a hiatus between December
1959 and March 1961, when the Abbey congregation
prohibited Merton from writing to Cardenal, due to the
politicised nature of their exchange. On Christmas Eve
1962, alarmed at the prospect of Cold War nuclear
proliferation, Merton wrote:
I am deeply concerned about peace, and am
united in working with other Christians for
protest against nuclear war; it is paradoxically
what one might call the most small and
neglected of ‘movements’ in the whole Church.
This also is to me terribly significant. I do not
complain, I do not criticize: but I observe with a
kind of numb silence the inaction, the passivity,
the apparent indifference and incomprehension
with which most Catholics, clergy and laity, at
least in this country, watch the development of
pressure that builds up to a nuclear war. It is as
if they had all become lotus-eaters. As if they
were under a spell. As if with charmed eyes and
ears they saw vaguely, through a comatose fog,
the oncoming of their destruction, and were
unable to lift a finger to do anything about it.
This is an awful sensation. I hope I am not in
the same coma. I resist this bad dream with all
my force, and at least I can struggle and cry out,
with others who have the same awareness.
153
(Merton to Cardenal in Merton 1993,
128–130)5
Largely due to his friendship with Cardenal, Merton’s
interest in Latin American culture, literature,
philosophy, religion and contemporary politics was
wide-reaching. He repeatedly expressed interest in
travelling South and maintained correspondence with
numerous artists and intellectuals, translating and
publishing their work in English, while his own work
was published in Latin American journals.6 An
outspoken advocate of shared identities across the
Americas, and of the need to reconcile the vast economic
differences between the two hemispheres, Merton
himself fantasised about founding a contemplative
community in Latin America (Cardenal 2000, 7–8;
Cunningham 1999, 57–59). As the correspondence
between Merton and Cardenal shows, discussions about
the location of such a community were underway
immediately following Cardenal’s departure from the
US. Merton’s plans to visit Central and South America
were never realised. Nevertheless, his writings, his
conviction that a common spirituality could present
alternatives to war and conflict, and that peaceful,
equalitarian coexistence was achievable in the
contemporary world, left an indelible mark on later
movements for social and political emancipation
throughout Latin America. These common ideals would
coalesce through alliances between the Christian and the
political Left on both halves of the continent.
In his later writings, Merton passionately argued that the
teachings of Christ, as put forward in the New
Testament, can be applied through Marxist critique to
the here and now.7 Distrustful of the oppressive
communist regimes in the East (particularly the Soviet
Union and China), Merton favoured the ideals of
emergent Western and Latin American leftist
revolutionary movements. Nonetheless, he claimed that
these could only be realised in a monastic community, a
uniquely sustainable form for collective social habitation.
Cardenal, on the other hand, saw no contradiction
between Catholic religion and his gradually militant
Marxist convictions. In fact, much like other liberation
theologians, he read the Bible, specifically the New
Testament, through the lens of Marxist doctrine, his
revolutionary élan reinforced following his visit to Cuba
in 1970.8
Within the contemplative community in Solentiname,
Cardenal’s teachings gradually led to the development of
a distinctive, politicised, interpretation of the New
Testament directly applied to the context of Nicaragua
during the Somoza dictatorship. Mass was held at the
church of Nuestra Señora de Solentiname, followed by
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154
I. L. Selejan
conversations with the members of the congregation,
often held, as Cardenal (1985, vii) would recall, ‘in the
open air on other islands, or in a small house that we
could get to by rowing along a beautiful river through
very tropical vegetation’. The conversations were
originally published in four volumes as El Evangelio en
Solentiname in 1975, which soon became an essential
document for the global liberation theology movement
(Cardenal 1975–1977; the English translation The Gospel
in Solentiname was published in 1978). Providing a
localised, applied interpretation of the universal
suffering and redemption described in the accounts of
the New Testament, these collected commentaries
equally serve as ‘memory aids’, oral histories that help
deepen a textural analysis of Solentiname, reconstructing
daily life in the community. Gathered around the
ancestral figure of the storyteller, the campesinos emerge
as equally formative figures, interpreting biblical stories
and events from the life of Christ through their personal
experiences. As recalled by Cardenal in his introduction
to The Gospel:
Marcelino is a mystic. Olivia is more
theological. Rebecca, Marcelino’s wife, always
stresses love. Laureano refers everything to the
Revolution. Elvis always thinks of the perfect
society of the future. Felipe, another young
man, is very conscious of the proletarian
struggle. Old Tomás Peña, his father, doesn’t
know how to read, but he talks with great
wisdom. Alejandro, Olivia’s son, is a young
leader and his commentaries are usually
directed toward everyone, and especially
toward other young people. Pancho is a
conservative. Julio Mairena is a great defender
of equality. His brother, Oscar, always talks
about unity. (1985, ix)
The Gospel is the most enduring cultural artefact from
this period in the history of Solentiname. Yet, similar
collaborative exchanges inspired the development of
various forms of art and poetry throughout the 1960s
and 1970s, such as the poetry workshops led by Costa
Rican poet Mayra Jiménez (1980) that contributed to the
development of nationwide programmes after 1979. In a
context in which art-making was intrinsically bound to
spiritual utopia, participating in the aspirational
movement for justice and personal emancipation, the
importance of these dialogues cannot be overstated.
Following several visits to Solentiname, inspired by
Cardenal’s work, dissident nueva canción folk singer
Carlos Mejía Godoy wrote the Misa Campesina
Nicaragüense (Nicaraguan Peasants’ Mass), a liturgical
mass composition that incorporated regional folklore
and popular music from throughout Nicaragua,
including indigenous languages and oral traditions. First
released in 1975, it was immediately censored by the
Somoza government.9
Godoy’s Misa was considered subversive not only
because of its political content. Its seditious status can
also be ascribed to its celebration of Nicaraguan high–
low cultural diversity, which was brought into dialogue,
rather than circumscribed, through a hierarchical
relation to canonical Western aesthetics preferred by the
ruling elites in Managua. While no strict stylistic
restrictions were imposed on cultural production during
the Somoza regime, censorship was common, and, as
was the case with Godoy’s composition, materials
suspected of subversive intent were frequently banned.
After the Sandinista victory, these became incorporated
into the larger cultural revolution as symbols of
resistance, reminders of an ‘era of hope’ to use Sergio
Ramírez’s (2001, 5–7) phrase, and fundamental to the
nation-building process.10
The intersection of religion, contemporary politics and
daily life translated most directly into the types of art
made on the islands during the pre-revolutionary years.
A small workshop was built as part of the commune in
Mancarrón. With guidance from Spanish émigré and
Managua-based painter, Róger Pérez de la Rocha, who
first visited Solentiname in 1967, an informal ‘school’ of
painting and sculpture was formed, leading to the
development of a characteristic primitivista naïve style.
Expanded to the larger community in Solentiname, the
Escuela Primitivista contributed to the emergence of
several important artists, and in some instances to the
development of multi-generational practices.11
Responding to the dialogues with Cardenal, the
paintings produced in the workshops staged scenes from
the life of Christ in the local context, and translated
spirituality through the everyday, hence creating
analogous transcendent experiences in art and life.
Gloria Guevara’s Cristo Guerrillero (Christ as a Guerrilla
Fighter) from 1975 is perhaps the most renowned
example. In a text written following his visit to
Nicaragua in 1986, Salman Rushdie (2008, 10) would
recall the ‘Christ-figure who wore, instead of a loincloth
and a crown of thorns, a pair of jeans and a denim shirt.
The picture explained a good deal. The religion of those
who lived under the volcanoes of Central America had
always had much to do with martyrdom, with the dead;
and in Nicaragua many, many people found their way to
revolution through religion’. As in Paul Gauguin’s
Yellow Christ (1889), martyrdom is historicised through
the presence of contingent details such as dress and
landscape, elements that would have been immediately
recognised by the members of the community.
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War in paradise
Landscapes and scenes of daily life constituted other
dominant genres, universal harmony manifest in the
extravagant greens, blues and purples, the Garden of
Eden restored. In parallel with the development of the
Solentiname social utopia, a formal visual imaginary
hence began to take shape. Within this developing body
of liberation folklore, fact and fiction combined along a
fluid temporal axis, resulting in a type of figuration that
David Craven (2002, 146) has described in the following
terms: ‘these paintings were not so much realistic
representations of campesino life as they were textural
evocations with visionary overtones of its daily fabric’.
Across various artistic practices, we see a reoccurrence of
familiar tropes. Thematically, the manner in which life
in the countryside is represented remains consistent:
immersed in nature, miniature figures are engaged in
various activities, whether labouring (fishing, tending
animals and the land) or coming together on festive
occasions. While the first generation of artists such as
Eduardo Arana, Alejandro Guevara, Miriam and Gloria
Guevara, or Olivia Silva introduced subject matter
derived from local myth and folklore, with occasional
reference to historical topics, formally they relied upon a
small number of compositional schemes. This can be
attributed to the prominence of communal practice over
individual expression, ‘models’ which, nonetheless,
remained pervasive throughout the 1980s as
Solentiname primitivism was becoming more widely
recognised.
As Craven (2002, 125) has established, the type of
‘popular dialogue, or dialogical process’, observed in the
parish meetings in Solentiname, led to ‘the idea that the
making of art, like the interpretation of key texts, should
also be made accessible to the popular classes in
Nicaragua’. Tested out first in the small island
community, this ideological framework was applied
through government programmes for what Cardenal
(1986, 408), in a statement delivered on 23 April 1982 at
UNESCO in Paris, described as the ‘democratization of
art and culture’ in Nicaragua during the Sandinista
1980s. Even before the revolution, however, word of
mouth regarding the progressive practices in
Solentiname reached broader communities in Latin
America and beyond precisely through the circulation of
objects produced on the islands. The use of
photography, which might appear most obvious to the
contemporary reader, was in fact only minimally
deployed. Nicaraguan photographers would have
encountered considerable difficulties in producing
independent, let alone subversive work due to
censorship, working in addition in a context where
materials and resources were scarce, if not impossible to
obtain outside of government commission or of the
155
press. An exception was Panamanian photographer
Sandra Eleta, who visited the islands several times,
beginning in 1974.
A JOURNEY TO SOLENTINAME
Photographer Sandra Eleta and writer Gloria Guardia,
both Panamanian, undertook the first comprehensive
documentation of Solentiname in November 1974. Their
collaborative travelogue was published in a book titled
Con Ernesto Cardenal: Un viaje a Solentiname (With
Ernesto Cardenal: A Journey to Solentiname, 1974).12
With a primitivista landscape on the cover, showing a
birds-eye view of bucolic island topographies outlined
against the pale blue lake, the title page opens with a
snapshot of Cardenal. Seen together with a group of
people, presumably members of the commune who are
carrying new provisions to the house, Cardenal is the
only figure in the frame who meets the gaze of the
camera. In the foreground, a man leans a large box of
Belmont cigarettes on his shoulders, pulling the account
back into the immediate present. Guardia’s text follows
on the next pages, succeeded by the remainder of Eleta’s
series. Viewed alongside, yet independently of the
evocative essay, the photographs thus acquire presence
and authority, by-passing a purely illustrative function.
Guardia met Cardenal in Panama City in October 1974,
through an introduction made by the Nicaraguan poet
and literary critic Pablo Antonio Cuadra; the
circumstances surrounding this encounter serve to
preface the journey to Nicaragua, motivating the energy
and enthusiasm behind it. Although inflected by the
complimentary tone in her characterisation of Cardenal,
Guardia’s account remains mostly reportorial, narrating
the journey in minutely detailed descriptive passages.
After a short stay in Managua, ‘una gran ciudad
despedazada’ (‘a great shattered city’), as Guardia
remarks, ruined during the massive 1972 earthquake, the
travellers head towards the colonial city of Granada
(Eleta and Guardia 1974, 9).13 There they board the ferry
to San Carlos together with Cardenal and William
Agudelo’s family, who are returning to Nicaragua after
two years spent abroad in Colombia and Peru. An
overland itinerary is chosen ‘en nuestro afán es recorrer
las huellas humanas del poeta’ (‘in our eagerness to
record the human tracks of the poet’), a clear
confirmation of the way in which the text sets out to
fetishise Cardenal’s character. Guardia and Eleta’s
journey is more than a journalistic incursion, or even a
sightseeing escapade; rather it resembles a pilgrimage.
Part of the travellers’ drive is a search for authenticity, a
desire to witness and participate in utopia.
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156
I. L. Selejan
FIGURE 1. Sandra Eleta, Juan Agudelo and Ernesto Cardenal in Solentiname, 1974. Reproduced by permission of the author, as printed in Con Ernesto Cardenal: Un
viaje a Solentiname (Eleta and Guardia 1974). © Sandra Eleta.
‘Esta hermosa travesía’ (‘this beautiful journey’)
continues in a small boat, and the group finally reaches
its destination: ‘Estamos en Mancarrón, en la
“Comunidad de Solentiname” que se levanta toda ella –
minúscula y gigantesca – en la punta de una isla verde
y arboleada, donde el amor cosecha revolución’ (‘We
are in Mancarrón, in the “Community of Solentiname”
which rises – minuscule, yet gigantic – on the tip of a
green, luscious island, where love has sewn revolution’)
(Eleta and Guardia 1974, 14). Eleta’s series finally picks
up here, and the photographs, although succeeding the
text, parallel Guardia’s descriptions of the community.
While formally set apart, the text and the series of
images are interrelated and their meaning is codependent and emerges through dialogue. The
narrative voice thus switches back and forth throughout
Guardia and Eleta’s expedition, careful to record the
scene in its smallest detail.
Guardia takes the reader inside the main building, La
Casa Grande, which contains the library and the shared
living quarters, where communal meals and assemblies
take place. Several people live in the commune,
including Laureano, Elvis and Alejandro, the three
young men who contributed to its building from the
earliest stages, and Doña Justa, the cook. All men wear
the same ‘uniform’, jeans, white cotton shirt and sandals,
Guardia tells us, as she quotes a text by William Agudelo
from 1966: ‘Aborrezco los vestidos de paño, las camisas
almidonadas y las corbatas. Y ese blue-jean que usaré
será un hábito, la insignia de un monje que vive en el
mundo, la ropa humilde despreciada’ (‘I hate wool suits,
starched shirts and ties. These jeans will become a habit,
the emblem of a worldly monk who lives in humble,
rejected clothing’) (Eleta and Guardia 1974, 15).
Eleta’s photographs abound in similar familiar details,
capturing the intimacy of the domestic sphere: a
farmer’s hat and a pair of work pants (jeans) dry out
in the sun, cows graze at the entrance to the church –
comical relief perhaps, a type of humour
characteristically found in rural genre scenes from
Bruegel, while still framed by a solemn simplicity
reminiscent of Jean-François Millet. Yet the
photographs only reference labour, rather than
portraying it directly. A sense of tranquillity and ease
pervades such pastoral scenes of unperturbed earthly
delight. In fact the only labour depicting scene is
captured inside the artists’ studio, where we see
Laureano painting a small balsa wood figurine, where
157
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War in paradise
FIGURE 2. Sandra Eleta, Ernesto Cardenal in the Church of Nuestra Señora de Solentiname, 1974. Reproduced by permission of the author, as printed in Nostalgia
del futuro, Pintura y Buena Noticia en Solentiname (Cardenal 1982). © Sandra Eleta.
art-making is portrayed as a pleasurable,
contemplative activity.
Solentiname: Juan enquires about good and evil, the
existence of God, life after death.
Aside from the daily routines, an overall sense of
harmony and joie de vivre pervades the photographs.
A telling image is of Ernesto and Juan Agudelo, aged
five, in a boat (Figure 1). A tightrope bisects the
frame, drawing attention to the child’s distracted,
contemplative gaze as they drift along the water.
Cardenal seems caught mid-way through a phrase,
and we are reminded of a conversation between the
two – as recounted by Guardia a few pages back – as
it took place on the way from San Carlos to
A photograph of the interior of the guesthouse shows a
crucifix hung over an unmade bed, positioned in turn
under the watchful gaze of Che Guevara, whose
haunting effigy, stencilled from the iconic photograph by
Alberto Korda, reappears further to the right of the
frame. The resting body, its weight still registered
through the visible wrinkles in the white sheets, becomes
an equivalent for the body of Christ, whose suffering and
martyrdom is placed in direct relation to contemporary
sacrifice, and political–ideological struggles for freedom
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I. L. Selejan
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and emancipation, in Cuba, Chile and beyond, as the
collage of posters and revolutionary paraphernalia that
frame the bed seeks to confirm.
Guardia’s rich descriptive passages again complement
the photographs: ‘Ernesto trabaja en una mesa, donde
está su máquina de escribir y, a la derecha, tiene
anaqueles de madera repletos de libros. Ahí vive él con
los muchachos de la comunidad y la habitación, aparate
de la mesa que sirve de escritorio, sólo alberga camas, un
lavamanos y una hamaca’ (‘Ernesto works at the table
with his typewriter, to his right are wooden shelves full
of books. He lives in this room with the other men from
the community, and apart from the table that serves as
his desk, there are beds, a sink, and a hammock’) (Eleta
and Guardia 1974, 16). All snapshots and narrative
fragments converge in the eponymous figure of
Cardenal, the ‘cool’ wandering monk, spiritual leader,
intellectual, humanist, poet and artist.14 In a final
symbolic image, his figure dissipates in the bright light
of the day. Ringing the dinner bells, Cardenal calls time,
gathering the community, maybe calling for their
spiritual and political awakening too.
Scenes from the Church of Nuestra Señora de
Solentiname show Cardenal and Laureano performing
mass; details from the decoration of the church are
visible in the background (Figure 2). Inspired by preColumbian indigenous pictograms found on the islands,
Róger Pérez de la Rocha worked with local children to
distil a language of play, plants and animals recognisable
from their environment, abstracted into signs,
metaphors of innocence regained. The islands contained
a scattered archaeological record of pre-Columbian
habitation, preserved in pictograms and rock carvings by
tribes that had migrated from the Northernmost part of
Mesoamerica, settling along the banks of the Great Lake
– a source of freshwater and sanctuary of abundant
variety of plant and animal life – during the last
millennium before the Spanish conquest.15 Local
artisans had maintained some of the motifs in use, yet
an educated awareness of these cultures was for the most
part lacking. Exchanges between such region-specific
and contemporary art practices in Managua are clarified
through formal correspondences with the avant-garde
group Praxis (active between 1963 and 1972), since
several members of the group, including Pérez de la
Rocha, employed indigenista symbols in their abstract
compositions.
Pictured in the background of the photograph, the
central mural in the church depicts the Tree of Life,
symbol for knowledge, and of the primordial Garden
of Paradise. The Tree of Life is representative of the
ideals projected by Cardenal’s group during this first
period in the life of Solentiname, while still ‘under
construction’. The altarpiece centres on a rectangular
relief made out of stitched metal cut from gasoline
tanks, painted red, symbolic of the blood of Christ
and the Eucharist. Bursting through from the bottom
edge of the wall, close to the ground, tendrils reach
upwards, gathering in their path the rich diversity of
plant and animal life. Harmoniously coexistent, the
human element is signified solely through habitation
and use in the form of homes and fishing boats.
Crowning the composition is a peacock, with its train
feathers open wide, an early Christian symbol of
Paradise and of the plenitude and totality of the
cosmos, frequently depicted in association with the
Tree of Life. The altar stone, barely visible in this
image, frames the composition in real space and
concentrates the rich content of the murals through
the repetition of minimalist geometric motifs,
markings, patterns of waves and spirals reminiscent of
indigenous carvings from the islands. Bright, saturated
primary colours dominate, complemented by milder
shades of oranges and greens. Gravitating away from
the centre, the side murals serve to diffuse the overall
cosmic allegory. These transitional passages work in
parallel to the seating area, where the congregation
would gather. The formal relationship between the
various murals and decorative registers is reinforced
through the consistent colour scheme employed,
which further relates the church interior to the
surrounding natural environment, through a sequence
of monochromatic sieve screens that make up the
main entrance façade.16
Expressed through the architecture and art made in
Solentiname during this period, the impact of Cardenal’s
revolutionary poetics and spiritual philosophy reveals
itself forcefully. While one could argue that Cardenal’s
vision of the islands was indeed ‘romantic’, it
nonetheless reflected the broader revolutionary and
social convictions of its moment. The importance of the
artefacts produced on the islands (and here I include The
Gospel in Solentiname and Cardenal’s literary output)
resides precisely in their contemporaneous ‘constructedness’, rather than in a search for authenticity. Cardenal’s
project was profoundly ethnographic, his role in the
community was as both participant and witness. Rather
than attempt either to justify or to contest the
philosophical foundations of this project, Solentiname
could perhaps more aptly be interpreted as sign of its
time and place, a complex ecology of change, grounded
in a utopian worldview that sought to nurture the
development of organic cultures in localised, more or
less cohesive regions from an ethnically diverse national
culture.
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War in paradise
Alongside the other accounts, and the objects produced
in Solentiname, Con Ernesto Cardenal was essential to
demonstrating the survival of an alternative, resistance
cultural movement, rallying support for the anti-Somoza
struggle. The almost immediate publication of the book
draws attention to the urgency of its context, especially
considering the rarity of these ‘views’ into utopia. In
addition, Eleta and Guardia’s collaboration should be
seen as part of a key period of transition from the photoessay format to the photobook. During the late 1970s
and 1980s, photobooks would become the preferred
medium for independent documentary photographers,
and were often employed as rhetorical weapons
circulated across Cold War ideological divides. While
the ‘golden era’ of picture magazines had come to an end
in the US (LIFE magazine folded in 1972 due to
diminished readership), in lesser developed mediascapes
in the global South, we see the continued proliferation of
paper-based mass-produced forms of photography
(magazines, books, etc.), due to cheap production cost
and the possibility of wide distribution and of reaching a
broader, popular readership.17
Violentamente dulce18
Solentiname was an important point of convergence for
Latin American artists and intellectuals in the years
leading up to the Sandinista revolution of 1978–79. Led
by the Frente Sandinista, the oppositional movement
had gathered tremendous popular support and key
political allies throughout the region. Following his
clandestine visit to the islands in 1976, in solidarity with
Cardenal, the renowned Argentine writer Julio Cortázar
would write his first short text about Nicaragua,
‘Apocalypse in Solentiname’, later published in the
volume Nicaraguan Sketches – a collection of 15 essays
written between 1976 and 1983 in support of the
Sandinista revolution. In the story, upon his return to
Paris, where he was living in exile, Cortázar rediscovers,
almost by accident, forgotten pictures from Solentiname:
Claudine took the rolls of film to be developed.
One afternoon, walking through the Latin
Quarter, I found the receipt in my pocket and
hurried to pick them up – eight rolls – images
suddenly returning of those paintings in
Solentiname. Back in my apartment I checked
the boxes to find the first slide in the Nicaragua
series. I remembered that I had first shot
Ernesto’s mass, the children playing in palm
groves exactly like those in the paintings,
children and palm groves and cows against a
violent blue sky and a lake only a bit more
violently green, or was it the other way around?
I put this box into the slide carrousel, knowing
159
that the paintings would appear near the end of
the roll. (Cortázar 1989, 30)
Through snapshots, animated by a slide projector on the
walls of his Parisian apartment, Cortázar revisits the
pastoral community as an in-between space, indeed a
utopia, where that ‘primal vision of the world’ depicted
by local artisans in lush primitivist canvases could
radiate despite, and even if under threat:
I almost hated to push the advance button,
wanting to linger with each image of this
fragile, tiny island, Solentiname, surrounded by
water and – police, exactly like this boy was
surrounded, this boy I was suddenly seeing,
almost without realizing, I had pressed the
button and there he was, clearly outlined in the
middle distance, his face broad and smooth and
full of astonished disbelief as his body collapsed
slowly forward, a dark hole appearing in his
forehead, the officer’s pistol still indicating the
trajectory of the bullet, and beside him there
were others with submachine guns and a
blurred background of houses and trees.
(Cortázar 1989, 31, emphasis in original)
The insertion of the photographic medium as a literary
device appears earlier in Cortázar’s (1959) short story ‘Las
babas del Diablo’ (translated in English as ‘Blow-Up’ and
an important source for Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1966
film), which is briefly referenced at the beginning of this
text: a closer look, reveals yet another, underlying level of
reality and consciousness, causing a disruption in the
narrative flow, where the viewer, caught unawares, is
thrown in a semi-delirious state. Drifting along mementos
of latent yet unrelenting danger – signalling the political
violence and instability of Nicaragua – the author’s eye
travels beyond to Buenos Aires, then El Salvador, Bolivia,
Guatemala and São Paulo. The text was written in April
1976, soon after the 24 March coup d'état in Argentina,
ushering in the military junta (1976–82), during which it
is estimated that up to 30 000 Argentine citizens were
disappeared. Crossed by violence present and past in
Latin America, such memories collapse.
Apocalypse waited. As anti-Somoza factions were
gathering around the country, Cardenal became more
actively involved with the revolutionary movement. The
peaceful, contemplative resistance movement he had
initiated in Solentiname turned to armed struggle. In
October 1977, following an attack on the Somocista
National Guard headquarters in nearby San Carlos, as part
of a nation-wide Sandinista armed campaign, Solentiname
suffered violent retaliation, and an extensive bombing
campaign led to the destruction of the island community.
‘La contemplación nos llevó a la revolución’
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I. L. Selejan
FIGURE 3. Larry Towell, A Nicaraguan child soldier stands inside a Catholic church against invading US-backed Contra counter revolutionaries. Solentiname Islands.
1984. Reproduced by permission of the author. © Larry Towell, Magnum Photos.
(‘contemplation led us to the revolution’), Cardenal would
comment that same November, in a letter addressed to the
Nicaraguan people, published in exile. ‘Solentiname tenía
una belleza paradisíaca, pero está visto que en Nicaragua
no es posible ningún paraíso todavía’ (‘Solentiname had
paradisiacal beauty, however, as is seen, no paradise is
possible for now in Nicaragua’) (1977, 24–25).
Although Cortázar’s story indeed prophesised the tragic
fate of Solentiname, it redeemed it through a ‘vision of
radical transformation’ to quote Lois Parkinson Zamora
(1989, 182). The writer returned to Nicaragua on several
occasions following the Sandinista victory, and to
Solentiname in February 1983. Remembering his trip
from seven years before, he wrote: ‘There’s something
very distant about the memory of those days, as if
somehow everything began on that date when I first set
foot on the archipelago of Solentiname and entered, in
secret and in the middle of the night, the community of
Ernesto Cardenal’ (Cortázar 1989, 110, emphasis in
original). Compared to the tragic innuendos of
‘Apocalypse in Solentiname’, the tone of the account
shifts radically, and he exclaims: ‘Prodigious acceleration
of history! Culminating on 19 July 1979, and opening
today on the vast panorama of a truly popular process,
which has already achieved so many tangible successes’
(Cortázar 1989, 110).
Numerous contemporary writers echoed Cortázar’s
unshaken, although not necessarily uncritical, support of
the revolution, also artists and many other intellectuals
who participated in the global movement of solidarity
with Nicaragua, determined to end the aggressive
interference of the US in the region.19 The claims were
further legitimated by the escalation of the Contra War
(1981–90), as the Reagan administration was providing
military and financial support of counter-revolutionary,
former National Guard and paramilitary forces. The war
would eventually corrode their idealistic stance.
The haunting vision of the young boy in Cortázar’s
story is significant in this sense, symbolic of the
countless muchachos or fighters who had become
martyrs of the revolution. This portrait of a boy aged
somewhere between 10 and 14, a teenager perhaps,
his tender young skin clad in military attire, was
taken in the reconstructed parish church in
Solentiname in 1984 (Figure 3). He stands beside one
of the murals, his head crowned by flowers and
leaves: an airplane plunges down through the clouds
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161
FIGURE 4. Larry Towell, A campesino peasant winnows wheat by hand with a fan and a coconut shell. Solentiname Islands. 1984. Reproduced by permission of the
author. © Larry Towell, Magnum Photos.
towards him, while a reptilian creature hides behind
his back. He looks upwards, contemplative, capturing
a bird in flight. In his arms is an AK-47, pointed
upwards, following his gaze. Distracted, he draws the
weapon close, as if on display; a heavy burden for a
child his age, yet notoriously ‘light’ enough to arm
soldiers regardless of age. The boy wears the uniform
of the Ejército Popular Sandinista (Sandinista
Popular Army), and was either a member of the
Milicia Popular Sandinista (Sandinista People's
Militia) or a recruit of the Servicio Militar Patriótico
(Patriotic Military Service) – a draft instituted in
August 1983 to enlist soldiers and personnel during
the Contra War, controversial due to its low-age
admission requirement.20 Other photographs from
the same group show civilians, mainly women and
children receiving training from the military, ‘civil
defense militia’ brigades as the captions specify,
much needed in areas where the majority of the
population was responsible for their own defence.
Some of the children play, others look on, while
others pick up the weapons to train. Childhood
innocence, protected through maternal care, and the
responsibilities of manhood converge prematurely
under the enforced strictures of the militarised state.
Taken in 1984 by Canadian Larry Towell, a member of
Magnum Photos since 1988, the photographs constitute
rare records of life on the islands of Solentiname during the
war. On this first journey to Nicaragua in May 1984, while
travelling with the US-based humanitarian organisation
Witness for Peace, Towell received an invitation from
Ernesto Cardenal to visit the remote archipelago.21 At the
time, the Contra War mostly consisted of low-intensity
battles waged in the border regions with Honduras and
Costa Rica. Some of these photographs from Solentiname
were included in his 1990 book Somoza's Last Stand,
Testimonies from Nicaragua, which focused on
testimonials by victims of the war. On several trips between
1984 and 1986, the photographer travelled to the war zones
and collected first-hand accounts from witnesses and
survivors. A small group of photographs, primarily
portraits, illustrates the text, as a visual counterpart. The
book is a stirring anti-war document driven by the concern
for human rights, exposing the devastating effects of US
foreign policy in Nicaragua.22
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I. L. Selejan
Yet despite the war, another rhythm, another flow seems
to permeate these pictures of life in Solentiname.
Although few in number, Towell’s photographs project a
nostalgia for utopia, a yearning for community and for
communion with the land in an idealised pre-industrial
world, devoid of war. Due to his far-reaching interest in
questions related to the intersections of conflict, territory
and geography, Towell was perhaps more attuned to
recognising the land itself as a major protagonist in such
high political stakes. With a large percentage of the
population living from agriculture, the implementation
of land reforms in Nicaragua had been a major
achievement of the Sandinista government. ‘Land makes
people into who they are’, he writes, ‘from the landless of
Central America, to the Palestinians, the Kurds, or the
First Nations, there is a predictable outcome to their
dispossession. The resultant uprisings are the inevitable
outcome when one's identity is threatened or lost – an
identity which is in the land itself’ (Towell 2008, 145). In
a scene redolent of Christian symbolism, a campesino is
shown in profile, his arm captured while still in
movement, now covering his face just under the broad
brim of the straw hat (Figure 4). He proceeds with soft
and elegant gestures, highlighted by the elongated
trajectory of the winnowed grain. Through the
improvised rectangular frame created at the centre of the
image, the primitivist landscape reveals itself once more.
Solentiname represented an exotic landscape and
populated utopia, equally it was a Garden of Eden and of
earthly delights. By comparison to idyllic depictions in
pre-Revolutionary primitivist paintings, or in Sandra
Eleta’s photographs, the islands ‘found’ by Towell in the
1980s were a lost paradise, contaminated by the
surrounding poverty and violence, a documentary stance
foretold by Cortázar’s redeeming, yet eventually
overpowered, revolutionary prose. Ultimately the Contra
War provoked an internal political crisis, alongside
economic collapse, and major disillusionment in regard
to the revolutionary ideals initially presented by the
Sandinistas. Yet despite its half-mythical and only
partially documented presence, the memory of
Solentiname endured. To cite Cortázar’s account of his
second and final journey once more: ‘in the midst of what
is still poverty and still the tropics, these persistently
tropical tropics, with all their drawbacks and holdovers
from the past, the exacerbated machismo – This is Latin
America in its most torrid zone, Nicaragua as violently
sweet as the sudden sunsets when pink and orange bleed
into velvet green and night descends, fragrant and dense,
thick with tiger eyes’ (1989, 110–111).
A return to that moment of contemplative dissent; one
might ask whether the presence of utopia, confirmed
through word and image, was indeed necessary to
bolster resistance against the inequality and violent
abuse of the dictatorial regime. If Solentiname was a
sustainable model, then a cultural revolution could
conceivably succeed countrywide. As Diana Sorensen
([1987] 2011, 225) has written, ‘Utopian thinking
transcends the constraints of the present and tries to
build speculative bridges between critique and vision’. A
more in-depth analysis would reveal perhaps further
clues as to how the legacy of Solentiname was more
specifically integrated in Cold War visual networks and
alliances, especially considering the influence exerted by
the Sandinista movement worldwide, even if during the
span of just one decade. While this article does not seek
to evaluate either the achievements or the faults of this
experiment, it prompts a valuable question, one that
applies to the broader Central American context
throughout the Cold War era: to what extent is utopia
necessary to sustain revolutionary ideals?
FUNDING
This work was supported by the Institute of Fine Arts,
New York University, the Joan and Stanford Alexander
Award offered by the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston,
and the Harry Ransom Center at the University of
Texas, Austin.
NOTES
[1] Anastasio ‘Tacho’ Somoza García came to power
following the 1936 coup against President Juan Bautista
Sacasa. Leader of the repressive National Guard (Guardia
Nacional), the Nicaraguan military and police force
trained by Marines during the US Marines occupation
(1912–33), Somoza also planned the assassination of
revolutionary leader Augusto César Sandino in 1934 –
the figure who would later inspire the Sandinista
movement. Once uncontested head of state, Somoza
solidified his power and influence through military force,
leading to his assassination in September 1956 by
Rigoberto López Pérez, a Nicaraguan poet. He was
succeeded by his two sons, Luis Somoza Debayle (1956–
67) and Anastasio ‘Tachito’ Somoza Debayle (1967–79).
[2] Examples vary from academic sources, to a broader body
of human rights-focused literature, photobooks and
collections of poetry. David Craven’s (1989, 2002)
significant contributions remain the most comprehensive
studies of contemporary art in Nicaragua. Other recent
studies have addressed the history of the islands,
referencing the types of art produced there, as well as the
relationship between aesthetics and national and/or
regional identity, yet primarily from an anthropological,
ethnographic perspective. See Field (1995, 1999).
[3] Cardenal moved to Solentiname in February of 1966,
together with William Agudelo and Carlos Alberto,
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[4]
[5]
[6]
[7]
[8]
colleagues from his seminary in La Ceja, close to
Medellín, Colombia. Through to the Revolution, the
commune subsisted mainly on Cardenal’s revenue from
publishing rights, and on the sale of items from the arts
and crafts workshop.
These events led Anastasio Somoza to believe in an
international plot orchestrated by Costa Rican president
José Figueres Ferrer and Guatemalan president Jacobo
Árbenz (ousted in the June 1954 coup supported by the
CIA, a first instance of direct US intervention in Central
American politics during the Cold War). The socialist
reformist ambitions of both leaders reinforced Somoza’s
cautioning arguments that a communist stronghold was
forming in Central America, and reaffirmed his allegiance
to Washington. See US Department of State (1983).
The letter parallels a series of 111 letters written to
friends in the wake of the Cuban Missile Crisis (October
1961–October 1962), all of which address the topic of
atomic war. Under the title ‘Cold War Letters’, the
collection was mimeographed and distributed, evading
the censorship imposed by the Abbey.
See, for instance, his correspondence with Victoria
Ocampo who published his writings in the seminal
Buenos Aires literary journal Revista Sur (Merton 1993,
207–212). In Nicaragua, his texts were published in the
magazine El pez y la serpiente, edited by the poet Pablo
Antonio Cuadra.
In an important lecture titled ‘Marxism and Monastic
Perspectives’, which was delivered in Bangkok on 10
December 1968, Merton addressed the topic of
monasticism in relation to contemporary politics,
highlighting the essential perspective of the monk, ‘where
he stands, what his position is, how he identifies himself
in a world of revolution’. See Laughlin, Burton, and Hart
(1975, 326–341).
In the aftermath of the 1959 Cuban revolution and the
1968 worldwide youth and civil rights movements, these
principles of engagement would coalesce around a
broader reconsideration of Christianity in the context of
the anti-authoritarian, anti-imperialist struggle in Latin
America. The phrase ‘liberation theology’ was coined by
Peruvian Dominican theologian Gustavo Gutiérrez
Merino, and is discussed in his important treatise
‘Teología de la liberación: Perspectivas’ that was
published in 1971 (translated into English in 1973, ‘A
Theology of Liberation: History, Politics, Salvation’).
Placing Christian piety and compassion at the forefront
of contemporary social and political transformation,
Gutiérrez considers the pervasiveness of poverty and the
lack of individual freedom in relation to economic
circumstances and class inequality in Latin America and
beyond. Far from isolated, these ideas lay at the core of a
larger paradigmatic and institutional shift in a region of
the world where Catholicism still represented the
majority religion. An important debate was held during
the 1968 meeting of the Consejo Episcopal
Latinoamericano (Latin American Episcopal Council) in
Medellín, Colombia, which supported the creation of
[9]
[10]
[11]
[12]
[13]
[14]
[15]
[16]
[17]
163
comunidades de base (base ecclesiastical communities), in
order to facilitate access to worship and religious
education to destitute, and sometimes illiterate
communities located in remote areas throughout Latin
America. Many of these communities became politically
engaged, recognising class-based divisions and systems of
citizen abuse in place in their most immediate context.
The National Guard interrupted the first performance of
the mass held by Cardenal’s brother Fernando Cardenal
in 1975 in Ciudad Sandino (near Managua). While
officially banned by the Archbishop of Managua Miguel
Obando y Bravo immediately after, recordings were
distributed underground, and the mass continued to be
performed clandestinely. Other examples of folk
adaptations of the Catholic mass appear even earlier, in
several contexts in Latin America; in Argentina, for
example, the Missa Criolla was composed in 1964 by
Ariel Ramírez.
Ramírez, himself a writer, was amongst the most
prominent figures of the anti-Somoza revolutionary
movement, and later became the vice-president of
Nicaragua, during the 1985–90 presidency of Daniel
Ortega.
During my visit to Solentiname in 2011, I met with
Rodolfo Arellano (born 1940), who was one of the first
artists to participate in the workshops, training with de la
Rocha. Several members of the Arellano family, across
three generations, identify as ‘primitivist’ painters,
working in a manner and style that recalls the landscapes
and genre scenes from the pre-Revolutionary era. In fact,
one could argue that the support the Sandinista Cultural
Ministry offered artists and artisans from Solentiname
during the 1980s, the demand for a specific ‘product’,
contributed to the solidification of these painterly styles,
as art and artisan goods became an important source of
income for the community.
Several photographs from this publication were
reproduced in Cardenal (1982), with additional material
from the November 1974 series.
Translations are by the author, unless otherwise
indicated.
In addition to Eleta and Guardia, detailed descriptions of
the daily routines in the contemplative community
appear in several visitors' accounts for which the most
comprehensive source is Vivas (2000).
The Chorotega originated in Chiapas, southern Mexico,
and were mostly based in areas that are now a part of Costa
Rica, until their populations declined during the colonial
period; Nahuatl tribes were of Aztec ancestry (from Central
Mexico) and dialects of the language are still spoken in parts
of Central America, including Nicaragua. See Cooke (2005).
I wish to thank architect and artist Marcos Agudelo, son
of William and Teresa Agudelo, who supervised the most
recent restoration of the church in 2011, for
accompanying me to the site and for sharing important
sources and insights.
In the preface to the most comprehensive volume on Latin
American photobooks to date, Fernández (2011) highlights
164
[18]
[19]
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[20]
[21]
[22]
I. L. Selejan
the importance of these publications to the history of
photography in Latin America, despite the scarcity of
associated documentation. Con Ernesto Cardenal provides a
pertinent example: An object with great aesthetic and
historic significance, that preserves a little known, and
otherwise inaccessible, body of work by a major
contemporary photographer.
‘Nicaragua tan violentamente dulce’ (‘Nicaragua so
violently sweet’) is the original title for the collection of
short texts and stories by Julio Cortázar (1983).
For a discussion of the literary solidarity movement, see
Hardesty (2012) and Beverly and Zimmerman (1990).
‘By 1983 or 1984, the Sandinista Army, which had held
constant at around 24,000 strong since 1981, increased to
over 40,000; in addition, late in 1983 a military draft was
instituted. At the same time, the Sandinista Militia – a
lightly trained body of over 60,000 civilian volunteers
who had previously been armed with liberated Somozaera weaponry and obsolete Czech BZ-52 – was largely
reequipped with Socialist Bloc AK-47 automatic rifles’
(Walker 2003, 51).
Telephone conversation with the author, 13 November
2013.
Towell returned to Central America on several trips
throughout the 1980s to document the ongoing state of
war in the region. House on Ninth Street (1994) is a
collection of interviews and testimonials related to the
disappeared in Guatemala during the civil war (1960–96),
accompanied again by a short selection of photographs
taken between 1988 and 1989.
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