The Visible City Will Perish

^{HD video, found footage, animation, stereo sound, 2019.}


In 2018, Nicaragua’s presidential leader Daniel Ortega announced sweeping reforms to the nation’s social security, placing a threat on the pensions and protections of the working class and elderly. Promoting socialist policies for the working-class in his early presidency and instilling a sense of hope after the overthrowing of the Somoza dictatorship by the Sandinista army decades prior, the protests and subsequent killings following Ortega’s actions rectified feelings of loss and corruption of a country salvaged by the scapegoat of US imperialism. Headlines of the atrocities taking place throughout the country’s capital only several weeks after they occurred further exemplified the lasting effect of the US invasion of Nicaragua and the promises set into place that echoed into the present state of affairs between the two countries.

The Visible City Will Perish investigates this feedback loop of promise and loss by stitching together the sparse imagery available online of the Contra Wars and Sandinista Movement and creates new amalgamates of conflict and dissolution through digital animation, overlay, and decay. The work takes its title from the remarks delivered by Ronald Reagan at a Dallas Ecumenical Prayer Breakfast in 1984, surrounding the time the US declared a state of emergency in Nicaragua. In stating “the visible city will perish without the invisible city,” Reagan alluded to the powers of a religious kingdom ever-present as a protection against all people under God. The title here examines the meaning of this statement when contextualized as a tool of US imperialism and the false promises of protection from an alleged invisible power.