Lamp to Remember
2022 / Steel, Lightbulb
This lamp serves as an observance for the people involved in the 2018 protests against the Ortega government. In what started as a peaceful rejection of social security reforms by Ortega quickly escalated to state-sanctioned violence against hundreds of thousands, leading to thirty deaths. Protesters engaged with metal trees of life, found throughout Managua and erected by the government, through cutting them down with chainsaws as a form of protest.
This direct engagement with an ‘Ortegian’ symbol is what I sought to capture in this lampshade, emulating the distinct spiral pattern of the trees in a crude and burned manner to reflect the moment the trees fell to the ground. These spirals also serve to let light shine through, projecting this moment of action onto the walls to memorialize.