This is the gas tank. Two batteries.
The Woody Woodpecker Show.
You should see it if you haven’t
And La Centro America is like the whole region
Come up, I’ll help you
I’m Ernesto Salmerón from Nicaragua
I was trained as a filmmaker and photographer.
I’m here in Tate Modern because
‘Auras of War’ is on display
It’s very strange for me to switch from
photography to a whole social sculpture
I never thought about it. I was just obsessed
I was interested in understanding my own society
The whole thing started with a photograph,
a black and white photograph of graffiti, with a defaced image of Augusto Calderón Sandino.
He was an icon for a new revolutionary movement in the 1970s
There’s no one way to understand Nicaraguan history
There is no one way to think about Sandino
Something you can agree with everybody is that
we want to rule ourselves. And Sandino is a symbol of someone who resisted
A photo is just a trace. I needed something else, something more meaningful
The extraction process of the wall is a jump-cut
Taking Sandino away from the context, it became
this huge heavy and difficult to manage object
There are writings here
Here is a name: Mario
The fact that it didn’t have a face, it inspired me to go deeper into the identity
of the Nicaraguan people
This is not a research that I do reading books, only
This is research that I need to confront
It was meaningful for me to make a road trip
I wanted to go deeper into who Sandino was to the Nicaraguan people
Having a direct contact with all the people that were talking to us, and many people were
curious and interested. What are you doing with this truck? Is this still going on?
What is this wall? Why are you traveling with Sandino?
Just quoting this image triggers
many memories for many people. You have family, you have friends who died
with this idea
I decided to use the truck. It’s a caravan,
like a political caravan. A testimony of conflict
It came from Germany to Nicaragua as part
of the solidarity process with the Sandinista revolution
When I was a child this was a dream, you wanted to go inside of this truck because it was
huge. It was beautiful and it was strange.
This kind of toy that you want to play with
but it’s a dangerous toy
This was used to transport soldiers to the fire front
And maybe if you came in the truck you would never come back
For me this research wouldn’t be real if
you don’t have both sides of the conflict.
If I wanted to explain this conflict I needed two war veterans
The art project brought them together as friends. Now they were working together.
It’s like a mirror, it’s like a social mirror
All my life as an artist I was making work
that I never realised was art. For me it was just research on history.
Understanding my own society
I am not giving the answers. I am just asking