Associação Cultural Videobrasil

Surgery of a TV Memory, by José-Carlos Mariátegui

“Not even the dead will be safe from the enemy, if he is victorious.” 

Walter Benjamin

Nowadays, television is a vital force that determines our culture, our values, and even our fantasies. In Latin America, where half of the families, even the poorest, own a television set, TV has been converted into a medium contaminated by a structural corruption. The banality of the chronicle of happenings, which seems to be of interest to everyone, generates an elemental substitute which is founded on the opposition to this banality: the thought subverts and dissipates it to reveal concealed, valuable things. 

The will to discover the importance of the television medium has motivated the change in reality, “re-creating” and decomposing it to generate a new view: what our daily view does not allow us to “see”. Ernesto Salmerón, a young Nicaraguan social communicator and documentarian, interferes in the “media” with his “audiovisual constructions” built on his observations and comments on the happenings around him. As a good social researcher, he recognizes the context as an integral part of his research, that is, today it is impossible to construct an image in itself. 

The series Documentos x/29 transforms a historical situation into a “post-historical” one, on the “latent” remembrance of present time and the “alarmed” question of the future. Through terminologies extracted from digital media (like the “POST-POST-POST REVIDEOLUCIÓN EN NICARAGUA”), he narrates an unfinished history which a new generation wants to appropriate through the digital intervention in a reality in which they were just inert participants through television when they were younger. 

Digitalization, as an extraordinary tool to construct and deconstruct memory (“Documento 1/29”), highlights the fact that there is not a single reality that can be sustained by itself anymore. In a country like Nicaragua, where there has been a long civil war, memory plays a fundamental role that commercial TV wants to dissimulate, amputate, and dissolve. Thus, Salmerón offers us a difficult, dirty, half-understood critical concept which reveals the mark of an unfinished process: the Sandinista Revolution. 

In the second and third parts of the series (Documento 2/29 and Documento 3/29), he justifies the social need as a consequence of the biological need. The universe we live is not only physical, but also symbolic: language, myth, art, and religion compose this social tissue which, as the biological universe, develops faster than the “Homo sapiens”. For this reason the concept of progress in “POST”-industrial society does not connote only the biological process, but, nowadays, also the processes of electronic manipulation: information is the valuable thing, not the object (which does not provide information). 

Information broadcasting constructs reality, something that, according to Salmerón, is not achieved through arms, but through an efficient “ideological arsenal”. Salmerón knows very well that he is a son of the media, of TV, and that he can delight in indiscriminate power. He reveals the media aesthetic of war images: the nocturnal lights in the sky make us think about air bombs (obscure but convincing), when they could also be fireworks. 

In respect to the conceptual project, Salmerón intends to face malleability through the use of the television medium, allowing a distortion of reality, as the “media” deforms reality and transforms it into banal facts. Undoubtedly, through a delicate intervention in TV, as a part a bigger surgery, the image may be displayed crudely, with all its own “noises”, with all its viscerality. This is an intervention that reveals the concealed forces of the medium and the level of repetition of the image. 

This new perception of the television allows us to develop our sensibility, knowledge, and the management of it, and also to realise how the new generations are more and more sensitive to TV: they know how to absorb the signs and significations of the medium and have the power to subvert the image. Thus, we can be optimistic about this future, in which power does not belong anymore to a few hegemonic media, turning itself to individual opinion. 

In Latin America, the violence and suffering during a large part of the 20th century have converted us into enemies of remembrance. Undoubtedly this remembrance is often necessary, for it is related to the collective memory of a people, to the feeling to know why still it was not gained. In Nicaragua, to speak well or ill of the war is still a taboo, something that no one wants to talk about, but it is a place where the dead still claim for justice. 

Salmerón has been working, extending this laboratory of recent memory of Nicaraguan people, trying to express intimacy and frustration in his own way. For this reason, memory as a social activity can be used to reconstruct a space and re-establish what was lost. Thus, memory is converted to a flexible substance that reconstructs forgotten fragments: a nation that must review its past to construct its future.