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Claudia Gordillo

El Caribe Nicaragüense | The Nicaraguan Caribbean

Claudia Gordillo El Caribe Nicaragüense | The Nicaraguan Caribbean

From the mid-eighties through to the early nineties, Gordillo undertook multiple extended journeys to the Caribbean Coast of Nicaragua. At the time the Sandinista revolution was in full swing, and she was working as a war correspondent for the party’s official newspaper Barricada, later as a researcher for the Centro de Investigaciones y Documentación de la Costa Atlántica (CIDCA). Despite the central government’s attempts to strengthen ties with local communities in keeping with its revolutionary agenda and nation-building efforts, as the decade progressed, already extant tensions escalated into armed conflict during the Contra War.

The Coast is a region where diverse Indigenous and Afro-descendant communities have thrived for generations, managing to subvert or avoid control from the outside, striving towards autonomy. Historically, the region had maintained its independence from the Spanish colonial empire, although it became – in part – a British protectorate from the 18^th to the 19^th century. It was eventually annexed and incorporated into the Nicaraguan Republic in 1894, up until 1987, when, the region was finally granted autonomy.

Aspirations towards self-rule are immediately evident in Gordillo’s photographs, as she portrayed the lives of the multi-ethnic communities along the Coast with dignity and self-assurance. Indeed, this extensive body of work represents a unique record of places and people who became the protagonists of their own stories during a decisive period in the region’s history. We are proud to present this work for the first time outside of Central America.

Location: Galerie Ecker