Ceramic Art
Ceramic Names Tiles at the Sumpul River Massacre Memorial
From 2018 to 2022, Salvadoran artist and University of El Salvador (UES) art professor, Lourdes Calero, led the collaborative, educational, socially-conscious community art project, “Technical Cooperation in the Making of Ceramic Plates for the Design and Construction Project of the Sumpul River Massacre Memorial Park, Chalatenango.” Developed within the framework of the Sumpul River Massacre Memorial, the 600 tiles represented the 600 victims of the massacre. The installation of the tiles involved survivors, art students from UES, community leaders, local youth, architects, and professors and graduate students from KU Leuven and Western University.
Artistic Production Workshop in Ceramics at the Cultural Centre of Spain in San Salvador
From July 2023 to August 2024, Calero and her students in the Ceramic Option at the University of El Salvador collaborated on the artistic and documentary exhibition of the Surviving Memory in Postwar El Salvador with an exhibition of ceramic sculptural pieces inspired by the events of the war and post-war in the northeast area of the department of Chalatenango in El Salvador. The exhibition included photographic and audiovisual documentation, among other tangible elements of the historical memory of the war and immediate post-war periods. The installation included a small sample of ceramics and engravings created by 5th year students of the UES School of Arts. The work was supported by an artistic production workshop, which was held from January to June 2024 as part of the contributions of the Cultural Center of Spain through visual artist Antonio Romero who established the methodology through three phases:
Conceptualization: for the theoretical foundation of the ceramic work, four face-to-face sessions were held at the Cultural Center of Spain, aimed at creating dialogue and socializing the concepts of historical memory and contemporary art. This phase encouraged participants to research the form, raw materials, recognition of the communities involved, among other aspects that gave coherence to the ceramic works.
Production: after establishing the concept of the ceramic work, the construction and finishing process were carried out in the workshop practice of the Machinery and Equipment course, a process that was accompanied by 3 follow-up workshop sessions for the discussion of the proposals and a debriefing process.
Complementary Activities: two scheduled activities were carried out as part of the follow-up after the exhibition, in order to maintain a social link with the visitors.
In parallel, the group carried out field trips to reinforce the research of the surviving historical memory. This process allowed the students to identify the importance of museography in public exhibition spaces at an artistic and cultural level, such as MARTE [Museum of Art of El Salvador], Museo de la Palabra y la Imagen [Museum of the Word and the Image], Case Museo Monsignor Romero (Monsignor Romero House Museum]. The students also participated in the 44th commemoration of the Sumpul River Massacre in order to connect with massacre survivors from Asociación Sumpul [Sumpul Association] and other allied organizations.
