- Ashes of Izalco
Ashes of Izalco/ Las Cenizas de Izalco will be a two-channel DVD projection with accompanying non-sync sound that will juxtapose an audio recollection of the Museum of the Revolution in Perquin, El Salvador with visual imagery of the Hotel de la Montana, an abandoned mid-century luxury hotel overlooking the now inactive Valcan de Izalco in the Cerro Verde National Park in El Salvador.This project examines the malleability of memory and the way history is interpreted, revised and received. The work examines the contradictions found in representation and the slipperiness of “truth and history.”The first component of the work is a DVD projection, which will include still photographs from El Salvador’s Mayan ruins and cultural history museums, as well as images of the abandoned Hotel De La Montana, built in 1966 by the government for its spectacular views of the Izalco volcano. Three unrelated events contributed to the hotel’s demise: the dormancy of the volcano beginning the year the hotel was constructed, the eruption of the Salvadorean armed conflict and, finally, in 2001 a 7.9 magnitude earthquake. Today the hotel’s crumbling edifice serves as a reminder of the uncertainty of virtually everything - history, geology, architecture, politics, and human endeavor itself.The second element of the installation will be three audio tracks describing a visit to the Museum of the Revolution in El Salvador, a space erected by former guerilla fighters in which photography is absolutely prohibited. These audio texts, transcribed into Spanish and English, will provide a soundtrack for the visual imagery. These “scripts” are highly subjective and help to demonstrate how people choose to remember events and how personal history shapes the way we understand these memories. To illuminate this point a third component of the installation will be a series of architectural models of the two sites, constructed solely from memory.
