 Great, hi everyone. My name is Mark Hallett. I'm the Director of Studies at the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art in London, and I'm really pleased to welcome you to the second of a series of research lunches that we've organised that will be running through January and then as part of an events programme, a busy events programme that will run through the spring. And I'd like to urge you all to check out our website, have a look at our events programme and sign up for as many events as you can. I'm sure you'll find them a really stimulating mix of talks and seminars and lectures that you'll find very interesting. But as I said, today's research lunch has got a particularly fascinating focus and clearly one that's certainly for me that is going to be something that I knew very little about and I'm going to find out a lot more about over the next hour. And so I can't wait to get started. But before I introduce our speaker and her topic, I just saw some housekeeping that I wanted to mention to you all. So all of you will be automatically muted when you join the seminar and you can only communicate verbally if the host un-mutes you, which can happen during the Q&A session that we'll be having after Iliana's talk. The talk itself will last around 40 minutes and will be followed by a Q&A where we invite you to ask questions. Today there'll be a five minute break after the talk before the Q&A session. So you can use this time to start thinking of any questions you want to ask the speaker, we really encourage you to think of those questions you're listening to Iliana, or you can of course use it just to refill your coffee cups. If you're asking questions during the Q&A question, you can use the virtual raise hand button if you have any questions or comments you'd like to make verbally by audio, or you can use our Q&A box to ask or write your questions and if you write questions in there, I'll read them out for Iliana. Use the chat box to make comments or to let us know if you're experiencing any technical difficulties. And just to say this session will be recorded but no photographs should be taken from you all please. And of course, as you'd expect, any offensive behavior will not be tolerated and attendees can be removed from the webinar by the host. So now to turn to our paper and first of all to our speaker. Iliana Seljan is a research fellow with a decolonizing arts institute and an associate lecturer at the University of Arts London. She's also an honorary research fellow at the Department of Anthropology, UCL, and she participates in the ERC funded project Citizens of Photography, the Camera and a Political Imagination. And this talk comes out of a really exciting book project that Iliana is currently working on, and it's a talk that focuses on forms of vernacular photography from the city of Bluefields, which is the capital of the South Caribbean autonomous region of Nicaragua. This is an area which, up until its incorporation into Nicaragua in 1894, had long maintained connections with Britain, its former colonial protector. So this is a talk and a subject matter that really extends our notion of the connections of and relationships with British art that we are pursuing at the centre. So really excited and intrigued to hear more about this topic Iliana. So can I turn over to you for your talk today. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for the invitation and it's a pleasure to be here and to share this work with you. So I'm just going to quickly share my screen. Can you can you just tell me if you can see my screen. Yes, that's fine. Okay, perfect. Great. So what I just wanted to say and I'll just jump straight to it is that this work that I'll present today is a part of a book project I'm working on. And I've been working on this book actually for about a decade now, the research not necessarily the writing and I've done quite a bit of extensive amount actually a fieldwork in Nicaragua. And so this is actually what I'll be reading today is part of what I'll be presenting today as part of the last chapter of my book. It's still work in progress. So bear with me and I will say also that my first journey to Bluefields was in 2016. I've done several trips since but the talk starts with that first journey which was kind of my epic journey and quite a few things have changed since but just for the sake of kind of the narrative. Yeah, I'm starting with that first journey. Okay, so. Yeah, I'll start. Let me just time myself actually, and that will help. Okay, great. So my journey to the Caribbean coast of Nicaragua takes me from Managua, the country's capital to the small town of El Rama, a place of transit, where many travels travelers stop to rest for the night. So here on this map I'm showing you this is Nicaragua. This is the Greater Central American region by relation to the Caribbean, and my journey starts here in Managua, the capital. And then I'm heading towards Bluefields here and Rama is somewhere around there. All paved roads and here and one can only traveled on travel onwards by boat or plane. The region is vast, taking up about 57% of the national territory of Nicaragua. Nature is lush resources are plentiful, yet a majority of the people living here are greatly disadvantaged. In the 2005 census, the latest one, one of the total out of the total regional population of 700,000, which is 10% of the country's population, roughly 75% live in poverty or extreme poverty. The estimate is 47% country wide. The reasons for the severe economic situations are manifold. First and foremost, current inhabitants are faced with the consequences of long term unsustainable exploitation of natural resources, gold, minerals, wood, seafood and agricultural products. Access to healthcare and education remains problematic, while the acute lack of infrastructure continues to create major setbacks. So, early morning around sunrise I board one of the speed boats that cruise along the Rio, Rio, Rio escondido back and forth between El drama and the coast. The river runs its fertile tendrils along the plains carving. Sorry, yeah, I have my notes. I, okay I'll start again. So, early morning around sunrise I board one of the speed boats that cruise along the Rio escondido back and forth between El drama and the coast. The river runs its fertile. Sorry, we're not seeing the images on screen at the moment. It's black. The river runs its fertile tendrils along the plains carving meandering sweet water paths, all the way to the salty ever changing ocean. Sitting in the crowded boat I watched the sunrise from behind the canopy, beyond the water's edge, brighter and brighter, burning my retina over exposing my pictures. My hand reaches out for shade, and I am reminded of a beautiful poem written by a costeno and inhabitant of the coast, the Creole poet Rolando Roland Brooks in 1987. In a world of life and sorrows, he writes, tell me who mourns forever. In a world of tears and laughter, please tell me who cries forever. In a world of light and darkness, please, please tell me who is blind forever. It had to happen Sunday, that's all, tiene que suceder algún día, eso es todo. It had to happen, Brooks tells me, and not to the inevitability of history and the fragility of time. Words imbued, however, by a sense of dignity and pride. So I reach Bluefields, the oldest and largest town on the Caribbean coast, former capital of the mosquito kingdom, also referred to as the mosquito kingdom, and current administrative capital of the South Caribbean coast autonomous region. Established by European seafarers during the 17th century, the town has played a central role in the region's history since, since as the primary location where local elites, Creole, mosquito, and mestizo would eventually set base. The mosquitoes are an indigenous group in Nicaragua, although a mixed heritage with people of African descent who came to the Caribbean coast of Nicaragua and Honduras. And the Creole group is of also Afro descent, African descent to be differentiated from the Creoles, which were, you know, the upper elites from the Spanish colonial period. So, let me just quickly go through my notes. To declare the city in 1903, Bluefields reached its peak between the last two decades of the 19th century and the early 20th, when industry and commerce flourished and a cosmopolitan culture thrive. My first stop is was the Center of Research and Documentation of the Atlantic Coast, SIDCA, in short. The top floor of the building is a small museum, which houses an assortment of artifacts and pictures documenting the history of the city. Most items were donated by local families. Some of these scarred by water and salt are tragic reminders of the devastation brought by Hurricane Joan in 1988, which almost wiped out the entire city. The museum can be interpreted as a device for collective remembering, securing a sense of identity while keeping it in flux through the activation of the personal through the intimacy of affect. While serving as a vessel for the accumulation of memory, the museum can also become activated as a means for collective remembering. As a physical entity, it can help maintain a sense of identity and belonging by ensuring the preservation of material culture. As a space of contemplation, however, the semantics are never, its semantics are never entirely fixed, kept in flux through the intimacy of affect, sight, touch, smell. Standing on the terrace overlooking the sea, SIDCA is positioned right next to the Bay of Bluefields. I noticed a large panel board with pictures stacked on. Some are historic. Others are quite recent, mostly low quality reproductions printed or photocopied. They rustle softly with debris. My guide tells me the originals are either missing or were destroyed. The climate is harsh and the center has limited resources to work with. We walk over to the archives. Photographs from the collection are stored in paper envelopes and plastic sheets labeled donated personal pictures of some soldiers who participated in the Sandinista Revolution that's here to the right, fotos de algunos soldados que participaron en la revolución Sandinista. A few updates and the names of the photographers scribbled on the back. This one reads, Roberta de Francisco, Bautiso, Iglesia Morava, Bluefields, but in most cases the prints bear no marks other than those of age. Donia Pastora en Don Sebastián en el patio de su casa con miembros de su familia, Aurel, 6 de Aurel 63. Donia Pastora en Don Sebastián in the courtyard of their house with members of the family, 6th of April 1963. Photocopies printouts again signaling the fragility of these archives, architectures long gone, residual memories stuck to the page in powdery black ink. Studio portraits from a city that has seen much better times. One of the librarians generously shares several folders of digital images from the Institute's hard drives. Some of these have been collected from Facebook and other images sharing other image sharing sites posted by history buffs. A couple of dozen more, they're mostly anonymous, seem titulo untitled. Some are minimally labeled 1948, or the March of the Band, but who were these people, where are they now, does anyone remember them. At a different angle, the fragmentation of the visual record coupled with the lack of a centralized archive opens up divergent routes for memory, leaving space for the preservation of identities while allowing them to regenerate and maintain their fluidity. The fragmentation of history lies first and foremost with the members of the community. While the telling of a history of history through a national Nicaraguan lens, the legitimacy of an external authority is put into question. There is an active resistance to the incorporation into national discourse, a reaction on behalf of these communities to the pressure to reveal themselves to an outer gaze. I want to give you a historic parenthesis to better understand the parameters for the discussion. Now, sorry, my notes got reversed there. So, inhabited by a number of diverse ethnic groups, Miskitos Creos, Garifunas, Rama, Mayagna, Uluas, the Caribbean coast of Nicaragua has historically sought to maintain its independence from the rest of the country, a separation that began during the colonial period and has endured through the present. The Spanish colonists mostly concentrated on the Pacific coast, by the early to mid 17th century, the region gained strategic importance for the British and Dutch military, as well as for traders and pirates. Building alliances with indigenous communities within the mosquito kingdom. The British settled from Belize to Honduras and Nicaragua along the mosquito coast. During the 19th century, so the mosquito coast actually, at the time, Honduras and Nicaragua, the borders weren't established, they hadn't yet achieved independence from Spain but the mosquito, the mosquito coast started more or less around here in Honduras and then went down all the way along what would be later the Nicaraguan coast. So, okay, so during the 18th century extraction, primarily of wood and production industries grew indigo, sugar, bananas, and large numbers of slave laborers mostly African were brought over from Jamaica. The expanding industry and trade drove several waves of migration around the mid 19th century from the US from Europe, also from China and Syria, as well as from the West Indies, especially after the abolition of slavery in 1834. After a brief period of Spanish control at the end of the 18th century, a British protector was intermittently in place until until 1860, when all territory, all coastal territories were ceded to Nicaragua, now recognized as a de facto sovereign nation. The mosquito, mosquito kingdom was confined to a relatively small area around the town of Bluefields, which was ruled by Creole elites. However, the Mosquitia, the mosquito coast was granted and guaranteed continuous autonomous status. Despite these agreements in 1894, Nicaragua forcefully incorporated the remaining territories, which led to the consolidation of power in the hands of a Pacific based mestizo political and economic elite. So this is a bit of a, you know, very kind of intricate history piece of history and I can go over it later if you want me to explain more. But what I'm showing you here are two photographs that I found in an archive on the Pacific Coast actually in Managua that are amongst the earliest pictures I've seen from Bluefields. You can actually see on the left, the palace of the mosquito king, and the kind of the center of governance, which was later destroyed. And on the right, you can see a picture of the Bay of Bluefields what it looked like towards the end of the 19th century, taken by Sequeira and brothers. Maybe a photo studio that was based in Bluefields but I haven't been able to trace that yet. Okay, so during the modern period. So roughly 1890 to the 1960s. In the power vacuum that was created by the British withdrawal withdrawal economic ties with the US proliferated and multinational companies thrive on the coast. The US, the US played the interest of local elites against each other and eventually the Creole resistance as well as mosquito claims towards independence collapsed after the installation of the Somoza dictatorship with the support support of the United States in 1934. Now, the period of prolonged this period of prolonged oppression, deepened economic disparities throughout the country, and affected the Caribbean coast tremendously as expectation continued unhinged and undeterred. And I'm kind of skipping ahead to the Sandinista revolution. After the revolution of 78 79 which succeeded in toppling the Somoza dictatorship. Sandinista leaders appealed to the cost of populations in an effort to unite the country under the revolutionary flag. In the 1980s progressed, however, despite major democratizing efforts and many social reforms reforms that were underway on the basis of historic differences, frictions between local leaders and the Sandinistas escalated into armed conflict. Some of you might be familiar with the contra war. From a cultural to cultural standpoint there were further complications as historian Deborah Rob Taylor has argued, and I quote the Sandinista revolution arrived in the east with a mestizo face. And quote, the Nicaraguan government eventually agreed to grant the Caribbean coast autonomy status in 1987. And that was when two legal territorial entities were formed. The North Caribbean coast autonomous region, and the South Caribbean coast autonomous region with first regional elections held in conjunction with the first democratic elections in 1990, when the Sandinistas were actually voted out of power. Now, not surprisingly, these massive conflicts of interest fueled by the entrenched this empowerment of indigenous and Afro descendant groups along the coast had a profound long lasting impact on cultural life in the region. From the standpoint of art making an aesthetics Caribbean practices had remained marginal, subsiding on the periphery on the periphery of the periphery so to say, through to the revolution. Indigenous and multi ethnic identity had been an identities had been historically commoditized in mainstream Nicaraguan culture, instrumental for the enhancement of the country's economic appeal abroad, and to promote tourism. The Sandinistas on the other hand soft substantiate their own political demands, partly through indigenista discourses so this is something that goes back to the 19th century throughout Latin America. And for the emancipation of repressed coastal communities and by extension of all of all subordinates groups, but nonetheless this indigenista discourse presented a lot of problems that I will get to shortly. So, I first learned about the Nicaraguan Caribbean through the documentary work of two women from the Pacific Coast, Maria Jose Alvarez and Claudia Gordillo in the form of a photo book so this is the photo book that they published in the early 2000s based on bodies of work that were produced during the 90s primarily. Now, both of these women photographers became active in the cultural sector during the revolution. During the first half of the 80s, Claudia Gordillo was a staff photographer for the official Sandinista newspaper barricada her editors had dispatched her as a war correspondent to to cover various assignments throughout the country. And in the 1980 she traveled for the first time to the isolated, extremely isolated northern Caribbean. And alongside the Rio Coco on the border with Honduras in areas that were then caught up in the midst of the Contra war. There was actually very serious fighting that was happening in that region. Now, after night so that was her first kind of journey to the Caribbean coast. And later, especially after 1984 when she stopped working for barricada she took up a post as a staff photographer a member of Seatka so this invest the send the center for research and documentation of the Atlantic coast, where I first went upon my first visit to blue fields. And the center was founded in the early 1980s and the idea was the Sandinistas founded the center center, because they wanted to both to establish a working relationship with the coast but the center also was supposed to be again a research center, and to to you know, it brought scholars from the Pacific coast of Nicaragua but from many other places around the world and it was supposed to be kind of a place of encounter. So, so after 1984 Gordillo served as a staff photographer member of Seatka working with a team of anthropologists she was tasked to document communities living along Nicaragua's Caribbean coast and here I'm only showing you pictures from blue fields because that is kind of my focus. The body of work is much more extensive. She told me in an interview that she felt supported in pursuing her vision as a photographer confident to suggest subjects and stories that interested her. In effect she worked as a visual researcher, being able to move with relative ease along the coast, and with logistical support from the center. Other photographers. So this is another, this is a page, another page from the book, and I actually don't have a scan of this picture but I find it really beautiful so this is also a picture from blue field, taken by the other photographer I'll talk about just now Maria Jose Alvarez. Maria Jose Alvarez was one also one of the photographers who worked for Seatka. She received commissions from them but she also worked independently. And she was a filmmaker and she, she began her career at the Nicaraguan Film Institute in Sina that was founded immediately after the revolution in 1979. She was working on producing newsreels and documentary shorts in support of the revolution. However, she relocated to blue fields in 1984 from where she likewise immersed herself into lengthy documentary projects and community work. And I'm showing you here just like three of her photographs taken throughout this long period from the early 80s until the 90s when she became very very involved in the region. She married a local political leader and she ended up producing this significant substantial body of documentary work about blue fields and the entire region really. So, yeah, so I guess what I want to convey is that both photographers initiated long term projects during this period which continued to at the 1990s. And in retrospect, given the greater sociological focus of the work, the revolution, which was a pretext for the start of this work becomes somewhat of a marginal subject, just one of the many issues that preoccupied the inhabitants of the coasts whether they were Creole, Mesquite, Agna or Rama at the time. I also want to say, so in the focus in their focus on portraiture, Maria Jose Alvarez and Claudia Gordillo in the focus on portraiture as well as on an in depth documentation of cultural practices and everyday life in these communities. They contributed to fundamentally altering the exoticized perspectives through which rural and indigenous subjects had been historically portrayed in Nicaragua. First through a colonial lens and also through these more recent forms of indigenismo. The Sandinistas were highly interested in producing visual imagery of the coast. This, like I said, was is a significant portion of the Nicaraguan territory, and the Sandinista came with this kind of idealism about kind of uniting the country under the banner of revolution. They were very interested in producing visual imagery of the coast and to present it in the various party supported publications and cultural supplements. Wani was a multicultural multilingual publication produced by Sipka, the Center for Research in Bluefields starting in 1984, and was the only Sandinista magazine dedicated exclusively to the coast. They were documentary photography portraits and types of pictures that might loosely fit under the rubric of ethnographic documentation of everyday life and customs. They were based in Managua, with a regional regional said center in Bluefields but the magazine was produced in Managua, and they were focused on regional issues and very importantly integration, openly promoting the party's agenda. Other contributors such as Gorbillo and Álvarez, there is evidence to suggest that local photographers were also involved. For the most part, however, photographic imagery in the case of Wani and all of the other state-sponsored publications was generally created by trained photographers who are mostly non-local and unfamiliar with regional dynamics. So this led to, I would argue, a rather reductive typological approach. I'm showing you here, this is the first cover of Wani and these are the second and the third. So I think that the fact that they focused on a very specific type of imagery led to a rather reductive typological approach where generic revolutionary scenes were being sought or portraits of everyday citizens and pictures of daily activities, these photographs served for the most part to illustrate the text. So they weren't kind of used as artifacts in and of themselves just as illustrations and they were rarely featured as independent entities. Since the core visual strategies and rhetorical devices were centrally designed, we must ask whether for the Sandinista leadership the quote-unquote making visible of the Caribbean coast was part of a grander gesture of appropriation and control. Several historians have noted the Sandinista government sought to integrate indigenous and ethnic aesthetic forms within its national cultural revival program, seeking to establish what they promoted as a broader, more diverse Nicaraguan cultural identity. And here I'm showing you, so Nicaragua ran a major literacy campaign in the 1980s and then in 1981 it expanded that campaign even further into the coast. The first campaign was criticized because it was exclusively in Spanish and the second campaign included English, which is the language spoken primarily by the Creole population and Miskitu, which is the language spoken primarily by the Miskitu Indigenous group, neglecting the other indigenous languages. But anyhow, this campaign for literacy, even though it was incredibly praised and incredibly successful at a central level and internationally, was actually quite criticized on the coast due to what was perceived as very condescending views originating in the capital and on the Pacific coast of Nicaragua, premised on kind of historic colonialism expressed from this kind of central government, Nicaraguan government. So a prevalent view, and I picked this cover, which is for one of the workbooks used during the literacy campaign because I think it just kind of speaks to this exoticism, the way in which the coast is perceived as this very exotic territory. The two figures with, you know, books open in this tropical kind of overbearingly tropical landscape with that boat kind of on the horizon, a sign of modernity. And actually that boat is probably symbolizing one of the boats that was used to kind of carry the teachers who were part of this campaign and who traveled to quite remote regions along the coast. Okay, so a prevalent view amongst scholars has been that the Sandinistas sought to overcome the so-called myth of mestizaje that was prevalent during previous decades and which was premised upon the existence of primarily co-extensive identities from the Pacific coast, where indigenous populations and Afro-descended populations had been more or less assimilated into the general population, while marginalizing indigenous and Afro-descended cultures from the coast. So this whole myth of mestizaje was kind of at the center of cultural politics during the Sandinista period, because many dissenting voices from the coast were again arguing that this was an imposition to further kind of assimilate the populations on the coast, which had their own aspirations for autonomy and self-rule. Okay, so post-revolutionary Nicaragua accommodated two variant indigenous identities. One that was premised upon a relation with the pre-Columbian past, which is sought to recuperate, so kind of classic indigenous trope, and another that sought points of connection to contemporary indigenous and ethnic groups and their cultural practices. Both directions that said both directions summoned and transported indigenous fantasies, and neither was entirely capable of sustaining the dialogical, multi-ethnic, decentralized pluralism that Nicaragua's leading cultural figures had hoped to achieve. Caribbean communities that were encouraged to participate and engage in dialogue, often withdrew, preferring to maintain an independent agenda. Therefore, an important distinction is to be made between the rhetoric and intentions of the cultural ministry and its associated institutions, and the extent to which their proposed course of action actually succeeded in practice as the decade progressed. Now, studying the visual record of the 80s, one might get the impression that photography quote-unquote arrived on the Caribbean coast with the Sandinista Revolution, as documentary photographers and filmmakers like Gordillo and like Alvarez arrived from Managua and beyond, converging towards this idyllically unexplored, supposedly unexplored, and genuinely little known territory. While socially and politically conscious, these practitioners nevertheless framed their subjects through an ethnographically slanted viewfinder. Approaching the regions as if it was a clean slate, the central Sandinista government neglected claims towards regional autonomy, ignoring the fact that indigenous and upper descending cultures already had their own history of identification with resistance and revolution across the Mosquitia and in the Caribbean. Artists and practitioners external to these communities may have quote-unquote made them visible, yet the very survival of their specific regional, indigenous, etc., and yet heterogeneous and interconnected cultures deliberately challenged the very norms of visibility, invisibility at play in the broader cultural field. So, thus far, scholarship on Nicaraguan photography has focused on centralized practices almost exclusively due to the prominent role assigned to photography in the aftermath of the Sandinista Revolution. Although little acknowledged, local photographic practices were however long established in the region and especially in cities like Bluefields, with photo studios active since the mid 19th century. Most photographers specialized in studio portraiture. They rarely worked on the street, except for important events, festivals and celebrations. And I think that some of those pictures that I showed you that I found unattributed and often without kind of any information in the Sitka archives point to the types of photography that would have been actually quite widely available in Bluefields from the 19th century into the 20th. Now, the last four photo studios to be active in Bluefields closed recently. And I will just run through and show you their storefronts. So this is Poto Robinson, which was ran for several decades by Roger Robinson, inhabitants from Bluefields will often kind of switch between Spanish and English in both pronouncing their names and in terms of the language. And Mr Robinson was actually a very famous baseball player, baseball is a favorite sport in Nicaragua as a whole, but on the Caribbean as well. He was a famous baseball player and also a photographer. And unfortunately, I did not get a chance to interview him and either of my journeys. Another very famous studio was Foto Malespín, which was closed the owner had recently passed away. And here I'm just showing you a photograph of the street front, right in front of the shop. So Pablo Malespín was the owner of the studio and I spoke to his son, who told me that there had been several photographers in the family so their practice likely goes back to the early 20th century. And then here on the left, Roberto Silma, who ran a studio called Foto Juvenil, he did not have any archives of any kind. He worked with firm photography from the 70s onwards, and he doesn't have an archive. So there wasn't any chance to kind of see examples of his work but this is his banner that he still uses in front of his house. On the right, I'm just showing you a leftover from a studio that had closed but it was now taken over by a coffee shop that still did photographs. And it reads, yeah, color black and white photographs, Karnet, which is an ID, ID diploma passport enlargements in one minute. And yeah, and there's another studio that was one of the last four that I don't have a picture of. I spoke to the son of the photographer, who's a photographer himself, who wants to kind of resurrect the practice. So, so these are kind of the last remaining studios that all of which were kind of decimated really the practice was decimated because of the introduction of digital cameras and then is really only in these small coffee shops that people go and have their ID and document pictures made so the practice has very substantially shifted. So this is kind of where I get into the end of my talk and the looser part of my talk where this is the research that I started doing in 2016 and then I continued in different trips until 2018 when there was a significant anti governmental protest in Managua that spread rapidly around the country and Nicaragua has been in a very severe political social economic crisis since blue fields was also one of the cities that was most deeply affected by that political crisis and now with it will be a matter of time I don't know when I'll be able to return and resume this research, but what I what kind of the where I want to end is that I think that even though very little photographic material had survived has survived to document the history of this important regional center, not least because of the destruction of Hurricane Joan in 1988. Personal photographs from family archives continue to tell important history about history is about this resilient multi ethnic community. So when I'll be able to return to blue fields and the coast and resume this research. This is basically where I will be kind of focusing my work and hopefully that will happen sooner rather than later so I'll end there just to leave plenty of room for conversations and yeah I look forward to your questions. Thank you so much Iliana so as we said, we're going to take a short break. So it's exactly so perfect timing Iliana thank you it's exactly 1240 so can we all return at 1245. Please have a think about a question you'd like to ask Iliana that again you can do through our Q&A function or through raising your hand so have a break and we'll be back in five minutes time at exactly 1245. I look forward to talking to you then and hearing your questions. Thank you. Hi Iliana. That was really interesting. Let's check. Great, we're now it's now. 10 minutes for questions which is great. And so are there any people who'd like to raise a hand or to ask Iliana a question directly. Now that we're back together. I'm just having a look at the Q&A screen and and also the raised hand facility. Yeah, there's one question that I'd like to read out here from Silio Barreto fascinating research. It is quite unexpected to see Victorian architecture in those early 1900s photographs or those 19th century photographs asked Silio. What are the attitudes towards the British that you've managed to pick up in the imagery or the histories that you've been exploring. Okay, thank you. Thanks for that question. So yeah it is quite unexpected isn't it, especially because I think that the way Latin America is generally presented in the public imagination. You know it's through primarily Spanish and Portuguese colonial cultural forms right and yeah again architecture and aesthetics. So, I think like this is something that a lot of people say you know that when you first travel to the coast it feels like you're in a completely different country and it's not actually Nicaragua. And what happens is that locals will pretty much affirm that, especially the Creole population in blue fields has this very kind of kind of put Nicaraguans and, you know, most foreigners, especially white foreigners that coming in are called Spanish. So, and they're kind of put at an arms length. So actually what what becomes quite quickly evident is that to date, primarily the Afro descendant population sees itself as belonging to kind of a greater Caribbean imaginary and culturally belonging to that area. And by relation to that to the kind of UK US diasporic black diasporic communities. So, I think that this architecture that shows up in some of these photographs very little of which was preserved. Really a hurricane Joan that I mentioned was an absolute tragedy because up until then surprising amounts of this architecture were preserved. It's all wood and blue fields had kind of several devastating fires but nonetheless a very, very significant amount of historic 19th century architecture was preserved and then hurricane Joan just leveled the city. It basically leveled the coast. Nonetheless, some some of this architecture still survives and people do regard it as a kind of a evidence of their connection to this kind of greater diasporic community from the greater Caribbean region but again by connection to the UK and the US and interestingly, some people, including local historians will speak about the role that the British had, despite having very kind of clear colonial interest in the region they speak about the role the British had and kind of protecting them both from Spain and from the interest of the Nicaraguan central government once independence was achieved in 1821 and 1924. A couple of other questions. A question from Adriana Arrio, who's asked really saying that they're new to your work, which they find really wonderful and interesting. Do you have a personal connection to this region and so Adriana is very interested in how you're interested in this area started. Yeah, so I've been doing research in Nicaragua for about 10 years now. It's become a very important place for me. It's kind of a second home. I'm originally from Romania. So I don't, there's not really enough time to explain how, but in regards to the Caribbean. It was very quick really. Once I was in Nicaragua and I was working in the Pacific doing research there and it became very quickly kind of evident that I was missing out on a big kind of portion of what Nicaragua meant or Nicaragua was about and the history of this country was about had I if I hadn't traveled to the coast and once I traveled to the coast then you know this other big realization came which is that the coast has a completely different history than the rest of the country and that there are a very important kind of political problems and demands and aspirations towards autonomy and emancipation on that coast so I wanted to understand that more and I wanted to exchange more with people and I just became completely fascinated really because there's another really big important center on the coast which is a primarily Miskitu indigenous community which is Biliui in Miskitu Puerto Cabezas in Spanish where I haven't even managed to travel so but anyhow my research interests right now are really kind of converging towards blue fields and very drawn to it. So a question from Rachel Malone. Thank you very much for that. Thanks Adriana for your question. From Rachel Malone said really interesting talk. My question is less to do with a political situation and more to do with photography and photographic equipment in this instance with then being not many surviving photographs. Is this the same with actually photographic equipment in blue fields. Is that also essentially. Yeah so again I mean I come back to the tragedy of the of the hurricane and you know this is I mean. Okay on the one hand extractivism has led to very severe deforestation on the coast but on the second and on the other hand like this is an area that's very very exposed to hurricanes. And it also leads to extreme humidity. So it's it's it creates extreme challenges for both preserving photographic material and any kind of paper kind of documentation for that matter, but also for preserving the equipment itself. So I spoke to quite a few people I visited a few households, and the majority of reactions were, you know, people feel the tragedy of these hurricanes, particularly Joan which like I said, practically destroyed blue fields. They feel it, even now. And so usually when I when I will interview people who will talk about these. Yeah, like whatever survived like people will talk about having seen their precious family photographs, floating around in the debris. After the hurricane, and so yeah so there's been very very little that that people were able to preserve. There was some some photographic equipment that was preserved in the little museum that I showed you. And one of the photographers son, remember I was talking about those last photo studios that were open, and one of the last photographers who passed away recently his son, actually in the house, they had kind of on display. So in an array of 20 or 30 cameras, but they were all film cameras so there was nothing really kind of more vintage preserved but still nonetheless I think it's very significant and it shows that despite this other perception that, you know, there weren't local photographic practices which just as a footnote is a widespread idea about photography in non urban centers in Latin America that you know in in more kind of rural environments, you know you would only have photographs taken by visiting photographers who would, you know, come into town and set shop from the 19th century into the early 20th century and that I think that recent research in Latin American photography is proving that that's very much not the case, and that for a really long time researchers just focused in the wrong places or not in the wrong places but they focus in different places in archives and so on and so forth and really what it requires is fieldwork and that's part of the work that I've been doing with this project. As part of the kind of this greater project I'm a part of at UCL. So fieldwork from those questions about what you're hoping to find on your next research trip is is your, I mean, you're confronted with this absence of material on you that's the great challenge you face that are you hoping to find just examples and instances of family photographs or studio photographs collected and other things that you'll be able to to work with and to build arguments around. That's really I just want to think about what your objective is and what you're, and in the absence of that kind of material what will you do, given how do you work into a vacuum as it were. That's absolutely what I am planning to do. I'm planning to interview people I'm planning to you know work on the friendships and connections I've established now thus far. And I think there's an enormous amount of value. I'm used to you know as researchers to kind of go to places that have mass of material, but really, you know, I kind of, I'm thinking to colleagues who are working and say medieval studies or even Renaissance studies who will will go on like this this huge kind of journey to just one document or just one page or just one illustration or just one drawing right so I feel like there's enormous value in the little that was preserved, it is being preserved with such care, you know and it's guarded with such care by people who have really the stories around those images and around those photographs and so what I'm planning to do is to. Again, through the connections and the friendships that I made to go back and to talk to people. I'll just give you a very small story. So, one of the oral historians in blue fields is full of not full but there's there's a number of amazing oral historians and one man particular. He I interviewed him one day and I asked him about photography and he said that. So he is afro Chinese mestizo so he has like many blue field Daniels has like one of these really, really interesting kind of heritage. He said to me, you know, in my first job as a kid as a teenager was to walk around with this Chinese photographer who had like one of those massive cameras you know like the really old ones and I was walking around him just carrying the tripod which was so heavy. And I just thought, wow, you know like okay that in itself to me is valuable and is important, you know, and at that point you know after that and I say you know do you have any photographs like do you do do you know where I could maybe find some examples of this man's work and he was like, well if he had those homes you know and or if at all and then he says well I have one photograph woman I was you know, a very, a very young man and he shows me a photograph in his, and he opens his wallet and he has a picture of his mom and a picture of himself and they're both of the pictures were taken and he is posing in a studio, kind of flexing his muscle one of those like very kind of like a workout picture, very handsome, and his mother's picture is actually in Nicaragua for a long time and even now digitally, but the common the common kind of vernacular practice was actually paint over pictures to kind of turn them into paintings and they're called retablos. And retablos is like a word that you know it's like they're like altars painted painted altarpieces. So, you know, there's a there's a kind of a long history long narrative here that I think can be interjected through even these like very kind of encounters with people so I'm kind of that's what this is where like my art historical background is interjected by my visual anthropology work, so. That's fantastic. So that's a great story. I realize that we're pretty much running out of time now. So I think we'll need to bring things to an end. But I just wanted to say, I think he was introduced a whole world of imagery and of culture that a number of us will have found entirely new and I think all of us were found really fascinating. So thanks so much and we really wish you well in your in this research project which sounds so exciting. And everyone else. I'm sure you'll join me in thanking you Liana, and also to mention that we have a whole run of research lunches coming up over the next few weeks, please have a look at our program and sign up and we look forward to seeing you again. Those events over the rest of this month and into the spring. Thank you very much everyone. Thank you Mark and thank you everyone. Thanks for the questions and thanks for being here today.