dieser beitrag wurde verfasst in: englisch (eng/en)
titel: Centro de Espiritualidad Monseñor Oscar Arnulfo Romero CEMOAR
adresse: Carretera Sur 11 km, Managua, Nigaragua
+: «On the inside and outside walls of this ecumenical conference center a plan is in progress for fifty to sixty murals centering, in principle, on the theme Five Hundred Years of Indigenous, Black, and Popular Resistance (i.e., to the new world capitalist order). These murals are designed to counter the conventional quincentenary celebrations in 1992 of the landing of Columbus in America. The center also contains mural ceramics, children's murals, and a large freestanding sculpture by the Swiss Barbara Roth.» (Kunzle 1995, p. 105)
«The CEMOAR project is complex and ambitious, an attempt at "plastic integration" in the tradition, says [Sergio] Michilini in his publicity brochures, of Bato Angelico in the San Marco convent in Florence, Antonio Gaudí in Parque Güell in Barcelona, Diego Rivera in the Chapingo Chapel, and Siqueiros in the Polyforum, the last two in Mexico City. The big difference, however, is that the CEMOAR project, rather than being the work of a single personality, like the antecedents listed above, consists of contributions from numrous different artists working in their own personal style. […]
"Plastic integration," in Siqueiros's view, is the means by which a mural tries to break through its traditional role as enhancer of […] a signle, flat, autonomous wall or segment of wall. Siqueiros sought to exploit surrounding space and physically involve the spectator by using polyangular perspective and by optically abolishing angles […]. The process has its analogue in the socialist idea of fostering popular and international participation in building the new order.
The complex of buildings constituting the Romero Cente, a former Somicista dwelling built in the going "cosmopolitan functionalist» style, with its repetitive, boxlike spaces, is prima facie highly resistant to any pictorial effort toward integration. Its location eleven kilometers outside Managua, moreover, makes it relatively inaccessible. The idea of coupling artistic activity with a re-created Mural School is in abeyance. Even before 1990, and increasingly since, the center hat seemed isolated from the popular struggle. It has not exactly flourished as a nexus for international liberation theology (it is now available to any organization for whatever purpose), nor can it, remote from any population center, attract local support (the Church of Santa María de los Angeles, by contrast, is in the middle of a poor, populous barrio in the heart of Managua). It is as if the mural movement, like primitive Christianity or the insurrectionary idea itself, were seeking refuge in the hills, awaiting more propitious times, in a "repliegue tactico," or tactical retreat, from the danger of destruction.
Michilini intends the CEMOAR to be Nicaragua's "first integrated and collective work of art." "Integrated" but not "collective" is the characteristic of antecedents (including those Michilini lists) in the tradition of mural schemes. For Michilini, quoting Siqueiros, "integrated" means a unitary art, the simultaneous creation of architecture, painting, lighting, and so forth – a total and indivisible vision. Given pre-existing buildings, the vagaries of funding (now much diminished), and the random timetable of invitations to, and the acceptance and availability of, artists (who must work virtually for free) and the multiplicity of personal styles they bring to the project, "collectivity" can hardly contribute to "unity" – the very opposite. Add the diversity of media already in place: sculpture, ceramic, mosaic, and painting (with tapestry announced as a desideratum) and the placement of spaces, most of which divide rather than connect, and the result is a mural museum or mural gallery (a "mural solidarity museum," perhaps) rather than a "plastic integration." […]» (Kunzle 1995, pp. 48–49)
«Artists at the CEMOAR have undertaken the challenging task of linking and integrating, in the spirit of [David Alfaro] Siqueiros, a complex of small, uninviting walls lacking in organic relationship. Siqueiros's style, probably more than that of any other single painter, has been absorbed into the mural vernacular worldwide. But Mexico is present in Nicaragua, above all, in the belief that a revolution is visually manifested in murals rather than posters, a belief rejected by both Soviet an Cuban models.» (Kunzle 1995, p. 71)