About the Work:

During the 2018 protests against the regime of Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo in Nicaragua, dozens of “Chayopalos”, political artifacts commissioned by the government, were torn down from Managua’s cityscape. In the hyper-digitized era, technology has become a collective memory device. Many moments of violence and protests in Nicaragua were recorded and later shared on social networks and digital news platforms.

The visual material testifies to the state of terror established by the regime and the discontent of the population demanding justice and an end to the repression. Its viralization has generated a fragmented collective archive on the web that maintains the memory of protest and resistance.

The teardown of these urban artifacts not only means a form of protest but a subversion of the scheme of power of the urban image imposed by the Ortega-Murillo Regime. This visual exploration fractures moving digital images as a “memento mori” that aims to capture the transition from monument to ghost.

The real-time event originally captured by cameras and turned into pixels, gets transformed into tangible depictions, as a memory archived in fractured, timely visions of the spatial momentum. This memographic Maquette challenges the nuances of remembrance to become a materialized memory apparatus.