Un soldado en cada hijo

On the night of Wednesday, May 18, 2016, a Coca-Cola soft drink delivery truck on fire powerfully illuminated the darkness of the Nahuatzen municipality, in the heart of the Purépecha plateau. Through the striking destruction of the vehicle and that of a truck of the Federal Electricity Commission, the population protested the government’s failure to provide them with uniforms, weapons and patrols to form their own citizen guard in order to defend themselves against organized crime.

To the experimental artist Fernando Llanos, the name of the municipality and that of the region were unknown until then, but the image of the huge burning transport made him creatively focus on the event, which occurred in one of the six autonomous municipalities of the entity.

He soon traveled to the place and the first thing he found were barricades and burned cars, but later he witnessed the great contrast between the official poverty statistics and the superlative wealth of the area, both in natural resources, as well as in heritage and traditions.

He immediately asked the Nahuatzen Indigenous Council to donate one of the transportation doors to create the video installation A soldier in each son, in which he projected a loop of the video on the auto part along with the National Anthem sung in Purepecha.

It’s very shocking the image of a German truck, from one of the most consumed Yankee companies in Mexico, burning on the Purepecha plateau, burned by angry people demanding safety. Most appeared dressed in sweatshirts from Yankees´s universities, underlining that Michoacán is the main state in the country with migrants in the United States. The videos showed the clash of two worlds of two contradictory models: native peoples and capitalism, says the video artist, twice winner of the Fonca National System of Artistic Creators scholarship.

The piece was ideal for the contemporary art circuit, but it did not satisfy his desire to generate a greater relationship with the community, so he developed more works about the leitmotif of the calcined vehicle, from tempera paintings to engravings and collaborations with local artisans with embroidery. puzzles, miniature reproductions of the wrecked automobile, Ocumicho ceramics, together with facsimiles of the newspapers with the news, in an attempt to caress the image that so impacted me, but always around a large central object, the Monument to Forced Dialogue , a monumental wooden reproduction of the truck, built by a dozen carpenters, in addition to the engine carved in quarry, the result of the work of six metalworkers, who also gave a workshop for children on their respective trades.

It does not matter if those 15 children are all dedicated to working with stone, but rather that you teach them their creative capacity and the scope it can have, explains the author of the exhibition Art and Resistance, which is exhibited at the Clavijero Cultural Center, in Morelia, until January 2020, as part of the Community Culture program of the Ministry of Culture.

Once the exhibition cycle is over, The Monument to Forced Dialogue will be donated and installed in Nahuatzen.

But his artistic ambition did not stop there. He is about to create the most beautiful, complicated and ambitious line of work, but also the one that can flourish the most.

Given that the cinema virus was inoculated after making Matria (Mexico, 2014), awarded as the best Mexican documentary feature at the 11th Morelia International Film Festival, Llanos decided to make, in parallel and in a few months, a documentary short film for That the Michoacan section of the same festival, Kuri (we are fire) (Mexico, 2019) competed, which he directed, wrote, edited and produced, and which makes him the first selected director to exhibit simultaneously at El Clavijero.

Based on the abundant recordings of the Purépecha photojournalist Juan José Estrada Serafín about the entity’s social and political problems, he invited him to do photography, sound and co-produce. Llanos knew him, through mutual friends, since the self-defense groups emerged in Michoacán and even made a television program, Purepenglish !, English classes for Purépechas, starring a rod puppet, Kuri, and that they will soon launch with the help of the Purepecha who study at UCLA.

The third part of the team is the composer Jessica Herreman, author of the music, co-producer and co-editor, who makes use of electro-pirekua, a brand new genre that reflects current culture, hybrid and impure, but innocent and ethereal, as well as music traditional and ritual of the area, along with a closing track by the Morelia band Fracaso Hippie.

Cameraman e Fixer: Juan José Estrada Serafín

Juan José Estrada Serafín is a Purépecha and the photojournalist, collaborator of the Cuartoscuro agency, Agence France Presse; and Univision. Specialized in work for print and digital press, independent and indigenous media, as well as for advertising portfolios. His work has focused on photography for documentary; graphic reports and graphic chronicles. In the field of video, he has specialized in documentary production for political, cultural and documentation issues, and the development of short films and video. He has delved into the visual register in the Purépecha communities of Michoacán and in other indigenous regions such as the Nahua Coast, Lacustre and Oriente Michoacano. Its main themes are social and political conflict and indigenous daily life. He has collaborated on photo, video and production in National media such as Proceso magazine and international media such as Vice News and Vice Latinoamerica, AlJazeera +; as well as in federal and civil society cultural programs.