This photomontage I made is a reflection of the creativity in ways of protesting and creating community in recent years in Nicaragua compared to previous social uprisings in the country before the 2000s.
It’s not creative placemaking as we’ve learned it in the sense that these artistic expressions are not concentrated in a single place, but they have worked to create an abstract space for Nicaraguans living under a dictatorship, serving as ways of protesting and creating a feeling of community.
The photomontage consists of four different layers. The first one is a black and white photograph by Susan Meiselas that shows a peaceful march in 1978 in Nicaragua protesting the killing of a student by the Somoza dictatorship. I covered it with the next three layers, which are photographs by Miguel Gutierrez, as representations of the shift in ways of protesting in terms of art. The top two layers show artistics expressions used during protests against the Ortega dictatorship in 2018 in Nicaragua: a handmade painting placed on a barricade, and sprayed graffiti with protest phrases on main streets of the capital.