‘… Bajó cabalgando en las grupas de los caballos que los
guerreros
llevaban de Francia a España, y se montó en las
carabelas cuando
los marinos más locos del planeta partieron rumbo a
América.’
‘… it rode down on the rumps of the horses that
warriors
took from France to Spain, and mounted on the
caravels when
the craziest sailors on the planet set out for
America.’
Ricardo Lindo, in Rara Avis in Terra, 1974.
El Historiante de Inglaterra, 2019
In the second half of the twentieth century, the Salvadoran historian and writer Ricardo Lindo wrote his poem ‘Historiantes’, in which he tells his mother of certain men who divulge a history from another time, another land. Lindo calls them witnesses of eternity, responsible for seeing that this history survives the passage of time. Studio Lenca’s Los Historiantes interrogates whose history is being told in a multi-layered photographic project.
The Historiantes is a folkloric theatrical dance that dates back to the colonial era in El Salvador. Historiantes, the Spanish word for storytellers, are the witnesses of history. The stories they re-enact through their dances are, on one hand, events from the Bible, principally the birth of Jesus and the adoration of the Three Wise Men; and on the other, the battles that led to the Spanish Reconquest and the expulsion of the Moors from the Iberian Peninsula in 1492. Originally taught by Catholic missionaries, these stories served as a way to evangelise and subjugate the indigenous peoples of El Salvador. Today, historiantes have become living archives of this long-gone time. Artefacts pertaining to the material culture of the indigenous peoples animate the performances, as the dancers carry pre-Columbian masks, headpieces and basic agricultural tools. If the Historiantes dance represents the Salvadoran peoples celebrating the triumphs of their colonisers, it also has served, paradoxically, to preserve elements of indigenous cultural practices, making of this traditional performance a mismatched melting pot.
Historiante de Colores, 2019
Gorra, 2019
El Salvador’s recent history is shaped by the legacy of a vicious, almost 13-year civil war in the 1980s and early 1990s. Hundreds of thousands of Salvadorans were forced to flee the country. Whereas large numbers initially moved northward searching for shelter in the United States, the Salvadoran diaspora is now scattered all over the world, and the Salvadoran identity is far from being singular and constant. Studio Lenca’s Los Historiantes confronts history as a disembodied and stagnant field in a gesture to expand the breadth of stories told about what it is to be Salvadoran today.
Studio Lenca started Los Historiantes in 2019 with a series of self-portraits in a quest to learn his own heritage, but soon started inviting others to take up the role of modern historiantes. Having done so to take formal control of the image-making process, this subconscious gesture also suggests the multiplicity of stories missing from the social Salvadoran imaginary that ought to be included in order to piece together a comprehensive historical narrative. The resulting images are an intricate play of composition and resignification.
The artist finds inspiration in the portraits of royals and important people found in big museums. He invites his models to emulate their poses, at the same time dressing them up with gadgets and replica items that reference regalia, luxury and the upper classes, combined with tools used by the historiantes of El Salvador in their daily jobs, such as machetes and other agricultural implements. This visual strategy is an intersectional commentary on the extractivist policies of colonial settlers in the Central American country at the same time as on the social status of the original peoples. By appropriating the European canon to portray a tradition that has barely been documented, the artist symbolically elevates folkloric dances to the standards of high European art and inserts the stories they tell as part of a universal history.
El Historiante Blanco, 2019
The images are crowded with cultural references other than Salvadoran owing to the artist’s lack of access to traditional objects or their total absence in the global market. To construct his photographs, he has to borrow commodities from cultures that share a common history of colonisation, using wax prints from West African traditions, for example, or the Palestinian keffiyeh; but he also uses English nationalist symbols. Studio Lenca recognises this laborious and disappointing process of searching and not finding authentic cultural signifiers from El Salvador in his work by dubbing the images ‘photographic performances’.
The absence of a Salvadoran identity from the global collective imagination not only underscores the invisibility of a community that is heir to the trauma of colonisation and acculturation experienced by their ancestors, but it also facilitates the uprootedness enforced on so many Salvadorans as the legacy of a recent grinding civil war, destabilising the individuals’ sense of belonging and connection with their homeland.
In this series, Studio Lenca reconstructs the figure of the historiante in a Heideggerian sense; that is, by inhabiting it.[1] By doing so, the artist observes the tradition not only to problematise it, but to decolonise a visual language by participating in it from within, as in Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui’s Sociology of the Image.[2] This allows the artist to be in a position of learning from and embodying an ever-expanding archive of Salvadoran stories.
[1] Heidegger, M. (1971d). ‘Building, Dwelling, Thinking.’ Available online: http://frontdeskapparatus.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/Building-Dwelling-Thinking.pdf
[2] Rivera Cusicanqui, S., 2015, Sociología de la Imagen: Miradas ch’ixi desde la historia andina. Ciudad Autónoma de Buenos Aires: Tinta Limón.
El Historiante del Mar, 2021
