[00:01:07] KIMBERLY

Welcome back listeners. Thanks again for tuning in to this week's episode of Art Uncovered. This week I am so honored to be here with Mariel Hasbun. Muriel, thanks for joining us.

[00:01:25] MURIEL

Thank you. Thanks for having me.

[00:01:27] KIMBERLY

Of course. It's so great to, to connect with you. So I'm wildly interested to learn about about your current show, which is up at the Salisbury University. Title of the show is called "With a Pulse of Community." And in a statement that was published by the gallery space it says that your work was largely based on archives and memories of El Salvador during the civil war. So I'm wondering, to give some context for that time period, if you could tell us a little bit about what was going on in El Salvador at that time?

[00:01:53] MURIEL

Sure. So the civil war in El Salvador took place between 1980 and 1992. It was basically the government and its military and what became the FMLN or the guerrilla movement, which became an internal army. It was very violent. 75, 000 people died, 8, 000 disappeared and many people left El Salvador, which is basically the bulk of the migration to states from El Salvador and, eventually Central America as well. But it was a very disruptive time to say the least. And I graduated from high school in 1979. So right before the war erupted. And I left El Salvador because of the war.

And so I was lucky that my parents were able to get me out of the country and have me study outside of El Salvador because [many universities were] closed. If you could avoid being there, it was a good. And it was good especially if you were young and male, because they would recruit, both sides would recruit boys.

They would just pick them up from the street. So my parents were really scared and they got my brother out. He finished high school here. He lived with a family and that people that we found that were really amazing people.

[00:03:28] KIMBERLY

Wow. So I have a couple of follow up questions. You sent me a a beautiful writeup that I believe is going to be part of the catalog of the show, is that correct?

[00:04:02]MURIEL

Yes, so the curator of the show is Jamie McLellan, but Andy Grunberg wrote an essay for it.

[00:04:10] KIMBERLY

Yes. Yes. And in that essay, I was really moved by the role of your mother. [Can you tell us about the gallery your mother started in the 70s]?

[00:04:05] MURIEL

Yes. So my mom in 1977 started a gallery. In our house.

KIMBERLY

Cool.

[00:04:20] MURIEL

Yeah. [At first] it was like by appointment. It was like a room that she set up. And then eventually, she moved the gallery outside of the house a few years later. She had always loved art and many of her friends were artists and poets and, intellectuals. And there was a lot of activity in our house with like cultural stuff and that became really my education, like my first art education. And also my dad was an amateur photographer. So that, that was part of the, like the entourage of what I grew up with.

So she started that gallery. Galleria Laberinto it was called or "the labyrinth." And it became like THE place for the arts in El Salvador during that time, during the civil war years. And so that's the contradiction that, at the same time that there was this horrendous violence and killings and disappearances, et cetera.

[00:05:24] MURIEL

There was also this incredible activity during the same time period. And a lot of my work deals with preserving a lot of these stories that We don't really know very much, like people don't usually think El Salvador and art together.

And it also counters this whole idea that, people that come from other places or Central America, especially, are not creative people. And so from my point of view, it has become a very important way of trying to say something about the place that I come from, that is a little bit different from what you hear, which is basically, violence and criminality and, like all kinds of narratives that stick and that people usually don't look beyond just the surface.

[00:06:20] Kimberly

I wonder if we could talk about some of those alternative narratives that you are creating in your work. So the showis made up of a number of different series or bodies of work. Do you have one work that you would like to talk about that exemplifies this alternative narrative?

00:07:27] MURIEL

Sure. So I guess the more specific one is in relation to my mother's gallery is called "Pulse New Cultural Narratives." And it is a body of work that I did during the pandemic and after where I went to El Salvador to photograph the seismic registers at the National Archives in El Salvador. What I was trying to do is map this idea of a cultural territory or the cultural land of El Salvador.

And so using the movements of the earth as this metaphor for the idea of, What I call "Terruño" in Spanish, which is basically homeland, but it really refers to the land. And so it's using really three archives from the National Archives that are the seismograms. And then also. My mother's gallery's archive, which I recovered and then my own photographs sometimes like in this case, for example, this is a self portrait. In some ways, it's my back as I photographed it as a self portrait back in the 80s. And then it also has the seismogram, which you see the lines and the numbers, going up my spine, basically, creating my spine, and then that detail of a painting by one of the artists from El Salvador, Carlos Gagne.

[00:08:20] KIMBERLY

A seismograph? Can you explain what this is?

[00:08:24] MURIEL

Sure. So a seismogram is a recording of the Earth's movements.

And so there are these documents that are preserved by many different institutions, right? Well, in El Salvador, they're in the National Archives. And they record the movements of the earth and El Salvador is a very volcanic place. It has over 14 volcanoes in a territory of the size of Massachusetts, and earthquakes have been part of its history, but it also reflects on our movement on it as well. And so I think about Yeah, we're walking on it, we're affecting it as well, obviously, the cultural output of our people is also part of that movement.

And so that's the idea of we all have our testimonies as people. And so this gallery had an incredible cultural and artistic activity during a time of war. There's a way of somehow preserving like it's in the land, hopefully, and at the same time you have my own presence there, like through my photographs that I made during that same time period.

And so it all comes together. Images that are collected, images from the earth and images from the artists [including me]. And then gallery that brought them all together.

YOUTUBEPROMO

[00:10:02] KIMBERLY

You mentioned that in this particular image on screen, which you called a self portrait that you made in the 9-s. Were you intentionally making work about the war back then?

[00:11:26] MURIEL

Not really, not at all.

Actually, I take that back because I was trying to figure out whether I should become a photographer. Then I had already gone to college. I had studied literature and psychology. I had always loved photography, but I never considered it as what I wanted to do swhen I grew up. And when I went back to El Salvador after college, I realized that all I was doing was photographing. I was going to refugee camps and going out on the street and photographing.

And so in some ways I was photographing the war. And then I was also making portraits of the artists who work with my mom. I have these records of that time period. I didn't know at the time what I was going to do with, but then it became part of Pulse.

[00:11:21] KIMBERLY

Do you consider yourself a photographer now?

MURIEL

Yeah, I do.

[00:12:27] KIMBERLY

I would love to, to talk about your style of photographs, because as I was doing some screen shares here, it became clear that your work is often very abstract. You mentioned that you did a lot of documentary style or street style photographs, but from what I'm seeing on the screen here anyway, it seems like you're interested in the abstract nature of photography.

So I'm wondering if you could talk about that style choice and maybe how that works in with some of the ideas you're touching upon.

[00:11:53] MURIEL

Sure. So I guess I always felt inspired, especially when I came to the US, by poetry and writing. I had this sense that I wanted to allude to things that sometimes you couldn't see. Which is a contradictory, like a paradox, with photography, because photography records what you see and so how do you do that?

And so I had studied literature and I was very interested in the idea of metaphor and the idea of synesthesia and how do you allude to different senses, even if the first one is the visual. Actually, my MFA thesis was about that specifically, about how do you incorporate how I had been influenced by poets in bringing together words to create metaphor, and how could you do that with photography?

And so the idea of photographing capturing what you can't see, what's invisible--this is what I was trying to do, and what I've been trying to do all my life. Like in some ways Alluding to emotions, alluding to other feelings, alluding to other sensations that are not only the visual or that through the visual, you might be able to get, like a sense of touch and a sense of smell.

And so Marcel Proust, the French writer, I loved. The Surrealist poets as well. So it's been like a way of trying to say what I have, what I want to express about the reality that we're seeing so that it's not only a descriptive kind of record, but also an elusive metaphorical record that, says something about our subjectivity, about who we are, about how we feel, how we react, et cetera.

I love the fact that photography is also a record and a document of something that basically was there, right? And then it's not no longer there. That's like the whole thing about photography. It's it's there and it's not there. But at the same time, I think that we can somehow pierce through these other realities that we sometimes discard that we don't think that photography can apprehend in some way.

[00:14:34] KIMBERLY

So you taught for many years in higher education. Were you teaching in a photography department?

MURIEL

Yeah.

[00:15:58] KIMBERLY

I would love to know how some of the techniques or skills that you use in your own practice, how that manifested into the classroom. Do you, did you encourage your students to be experimental with their media? Did you encourage them to to work with communities?

[00:16:17] MURIEL

All of the above. It's a balance. On the one hand, there can be very specific classes that are about something like, experimental photography, which would be a way to just go deep into ways of being very creative in the ways that you use the medium. But I'm also interested in using different mediums to communicate things. I guess I've always emphasized in my teaching that the form really needs to follow the content. Like you have to figure out how it is that you can marry these two things.

[00:15:46] MURIEL

And and it's always a process of researching, not just the thing that you're trying to study. To explore, but also within yourself, like how it is that you're reacting and responding to what you're seeing or trying to explain. And I always think that at least from my point of view, doing a series of photographs is about answering a question, if you have a question, you have a premise, you may have some ideas, but you're not really sure until you explore it.

Thanks

I wish I had you as a teacher. Are you retireed?

[00:17:21] MURIEL

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

[00:17:23] KIMBERLY

So I guess my final question for you, Muriel, is-- I'd love to learn about Labertino projects. Labertino.

[00:17:38] MURIEL

It evolved out of my teaching actually.

[00:17:40] KIMBERLY

Okay. Okay. Okay.

[00:17:41] MURIEL

So Laberinto Projects is based on my mother's gallery's archive. So that's why it's called Laberinto, because the name of the gallery was Labyrinth. So in 2006, I had a Fulbright Scholar Grant and I went to El Salvador.

[00:19:51] MURIEL

And it was the first time that I went to El Salvador as an adult, as an artist, doing an exhibition and teaching workshops and bringing community together, which is basically like a little model of what I wanted to do with my work in all of its forms. And so I was like making photographs, having exhibitions, but also engaging with community.

[00:18:23] MURIEL

And I wanted to get to know El Salvador in a different way, basically as an adult, because I had left so young, and even though I had gone back and forth a lot. This was a time to explore a little bit more about its history. But when I came back, I found that I really wanted to create some sort of link between there and here, especially One, through my teaching, two, through some sort of vehicle for artists to communicate.

[00:18:54] MURIEL

And yeah, just basically just findinga way of connecting and for me to find, to learn more about the history and everything. I decided to teach a class on El Salvador. It's our culture. That's how it started. And I began to bring speakers into the class, people who were based in the U.S. And then I would always have some sort of component that was an outreach component with my students. And it evolved into this sort of laboratory about El Salvador and its artists. And the way that it started is because, that it continued was because my mom passed away in 2012, and after that, I decided that I would teach the class as this kind of laboratory about Labyrinth And so there were students who were photography students and also masters new media and photojournalism students and some exhibition design students. There were like, like a very interdisciplinary group of students who would help create this growing archive, like part of it was to preserve it. And then the other was to create more things that would be part of this archive that would inform it. So we went to El Salvador to photograph to actually video interview a series of artists who had worked with my mom so that we could learn about the time period.

And then it evolved from there. Then in 2016. So I don't know if you know the story of the Corcoran, but the Corcoran was taken over by George Washington University and its collection was taken over by the National Gallery of Art. And in that whole process, two years after 2014 and 2016, many of us lost our job as part of this whole change. And so I was like, okay I've been doing this all these years teaching it. And then, we had just finished like doing these amazing exhibitions. One of them was called Legacy and Memory, Tracing the Labyrinth.The other one in the year after was Vivencias, which was a series of exhibitions that my mother had in the gallery that were the first instances of installation and performance in El Salvador in a gallery. And We created this exhibition that was like a dialogue between young students, young artists and the older artists.

And so then I ended up doing workshops for K through 12 and museum educators if they wanted to learn about the art and culture of El Salvador. And I ended up taking them there and having them meet all these artists and learn about, the art and the country and the history and et cetera, which is basically what I had done with my students. So now it's this platform that exists.

[00:22:49] KIMBERLY

That's so exciting. Are you still doing workshops and exhibitions?

[00:22:53] MURIEL

I haven't gotten them since the pandemic, but I do small workshops. But, of course, as part of my own work, I also have interactive installations that are part of it. And for example, there's one that's in the show in Salisbury, where there's two sculptures that I made with an artist from El Salvador.

And these two exist, they're in the two different countries in the U. S. and in El Salvador. And through that there's like a little workshop that I do with people that come to it and they respond to the different artworks from the collection that my mom had in the gallery or the art, some of the artwork that was, shown at the gallery.

STUDENT RECORDINGS

So I chose La Canva by Armando Campos and I chose this piece because it made me think of all the people who could have been artists if they had the chance. Hey everybody. So I picked Antonio Bonilla bajo justicia. So I picked this one because the artist is obviously talking about sombra, which is part of the lecture, right?

Thinking about how shadows are places where a lot of things happen and a lot of things are forgotten or masked.

[00:24:31] MURIEL

And they eventually tell a story or a memory that's basically comes out of this artwork.

STUDENT RECORDINGS

Growing up like first generation, like Guatemalan American, when I look back at pictures of what home looks like or my family's home, it's always like these colors and I think these colors are really like prominent when it comes to Central American art.

[00:24:54] MURIEL

Then at the same time you're able to transmit your heartbeat to the other country and hear it in the other country. And so it's like this, bodily response to art.

[00:25:06] KIMBERLY

So this show that is up at Salisbury university, again, the title of which is called with a pulse of community that is up until October 26th. All right, listeners, if any of you are based in Maryland, please stop by.

Muriel, thank you so much for joining us. It was absolutely an honor and yeah, thank you for your time.

[00:25:49] MURIEL

Thank you. It was great