C. E. Fitzgerald

This short-run tabloid newspaper contains video stills and photographs that I made during recent trips to El Salvador, a country where I lived from 2009 to 2011. The stills, from a video piece of the same name, show a sequence of me running in front of a house in San Salvador. These images are folded into the newspaper in a non-linear manner but can be separated and reordered into a new configuration.

The photographs in the first half of the newspaper deal with the loss of a close Salvadoran friend, and the current climate of fear and insecurity that beleaguers the region; the images in the second half show vestiges of the Salvadoran Civil War and traces of US intervention in said conflict.

An image list – available upon request – with descriptions of the individual photographs, in English and Spanish, is inserted into the newspaper.

This five-channel video piece shows streets in San Salvador, a city that I lived in from 2009 to 2011. The videos are devoid of pedestrians as well as traffic and, with the exception of blurred representations of me periodically crossing the scenes, resemble still photographs. My figure is blurred as I traverse the frame in staggered intervals of varying length. My body occasionally gets “stuck” in the image, as though it were a residue left in the scene.  After these pauses my stalled figure resumes its movement or reincorporates into another one of my blurred representations.

I have included excerpts here of the piece as a whole, as well as the individual channels. These excerpts, however, do not show the occasional long intervals in which my figure does not appear in any of the channels.

In 2017 I visited the Museo de la Revolución (Museum of the Revolution) in Perquín, El Salvador. A blast crater, formed by the detonation of a 500-pound US-manufactured bomb, sits behind the small museum.

At the time of my visit the crater was overgrown with dense foliage – partially obscuring this trace of US involvement in El Salvador’s bloody civil war. As a performative gesture (with permission from the museum’s staff), I walked through the center of the crater to form a straight line.

Murmullos, Spanish for murmurs or whispers, is a body of work dealing with legacies of violence in Central America. My current iteration of the project uses audio and video projection to explore US involvement in El Salvador’s civil war during the 1970s and 80s. I am pairing audio tracks of me reading declassified government documents aloud with videos of the Salvadoran jungle at night. Recorded in areas of El Salvador that saw great suffering during the war, the videos are poorly lit and contain a dearth of visual information. Viewers’ only opportunity to fully make out the contents of the images is fleeting bursts of light, revealing dense foliage.

The Museo de la Revolución (Museum of the Revolution) in Perquín, El Salvador, features an exhibit about Radio Venceremos – a guerilla-run radio station that broadcasted during the Salvadoran Civil War. The radio station was a thorn in the military’s side throughout the entirety of the conflict, as it allowed the rebels to disseminate their ideology and ridicule the US-backed government. The exhibit contains original equipment and gives one a sense of what it was like to broadcast from a clandestine location within contested territory.

I made a video, during a recent visit to the museum, of me walking behind a diaphanous partition included in the exhibit. I pace back and forth in the room leaving a pair of reflections that intermingle with ripples in the plastic as the partition sways in the breeze.

They say that you can see the Pacific Ocean from the top of El Cerro Verde, a complex of volcanoes in Western El Salvador. But I never manage to see past the mist. It swirls in a slow advance. I keep an eye on it, half hoping that a hole will open up to reveal the horizon. But it never does. It just circles in a slow-motion churn.

I struggle to interpolate the information that lies beyond this cloudy barrier. When I remove the mist from my video recordings I am left with nothing but a distressed white background. This treatment of the footage ends up concealing more than it reveals.

This video piece emerged from my interest in Green Valley, a retirement community located 40 miles from the US-Mexico border. I became aware of Green Valley in 2014, during a period of time when I traveled frequently to Nogales, Sonora (a border town in Northern Mexico). While I initially paid little attention to the quiet retirement community, stopping only to refuel my car, Green Valley began to pique my interest because it is simultaneously near – geographically – and far – culturally and socioeconomically – from communities in Northern Mexico. Moving between Green Valley and Nogales is akin to traveling to parallel universes – distinct realities in very close proximity, yet worlds apart.

This video deals with existential forces and despair. The title refers to a passage from Shakespeare’s King Lear, where the Duke of Gloucester expresses absolute hopelessness after suffering a string of events that, in the mind of the Duke, could only be inflicted by gods akin to immature children: "As flies to wanton boys are we to th' gods. They kill us for their sport."

I used to say that my photography practice entailed chasing light. I would hedge my bets by photographing in the morning or afternoon. I would cross the street to the side where the shadows fell in the right direction. But as I spend an increasing amount of time in front of screens, I have taken on a different pursuit. I now chase information through cables – ones and zeros traveling at the speed of light. I click and I click, but am always a few steps behind.