Nicaraguan village - Monimbó 1978
The picture Nicaraguan village - Monimbó 1978 is a representation on the gable facade of a residential building in the Berlin district of Lichtenberg, completed in 1985 . The mural with scenes from everyday life in a small village in Nicaragua was commissioned by the East Berlin magistrate to the Nicaraguan artist Manuel García Moia . The GDR government supported, among other things, the liberation struggle of the Nicaraguan people against the Somoza regime . After the fall of the Wall , the building was privatized and the gable picture was created as a replica on the renovated wall surface. However, due to poor materials and poor work, large parts fell off from 2011 and finally the painted insulation layer had to be removed again for safety reasons. Since then, a citizens' initiative has been striving for a second renewal (as of May 2017).
The topic
On behalf of the Magistrate of Berlin and the Ministry of Culture of the GDR, Moia, national prize winner for naive art of Nicaragua, created a large gable wall painting in Berlin on the Lichtenberger Bridge at the house at Skandinavische Straße 26. The painting with the title Nicaraguan Village - Monimbó 1978 , with participation Created by Martin Hoffmann and Trakia Wendisch (the light colors were applied layer by layer on a black primed layer of plaster until they glowed), was handed over to the Lichtenberg district on August 27, 1985. On a painted area of 255 square meters, it depicts the daily life and struggle of the oppressed population in many small stories. According to the English art scholar David Kunzle, the painting is one of the largest murals with naive painting in the world.
"... It is a testimony to an extraordinary creative era of murals in Latin America."
Historical background
The Democratic Liberation Front ( UDEL ), an amalgamation of various parties, and the two largest trade unions in Nicaragua jointly called at the end of 1977 for the state of siege to be lifted, press censorship and the introduction of trade union and democratic freedoms as well as a general amnesty in the country. In this situation, as well as in severe military ( Sandinista ) and political distress, the dictator, President Anastasio Somoza Debayle , tried to “escape forward”. On January 10, 1978, on his orders, the chairman of the UDEL and popular publisher of the opposition newspaper La Prensa , Pedro Joaquín Chamorro, was murdered in the street. With the murder of his main political rival, Somoza wanted to hit the opposition decisively, but had the opposite effect: The resentment that had been pent up for decades broke through, and for the first time the Nicaraguan people united in a nationwide general strike .
During this time there was also a spontaneous popular uprising in Masaya , the fifth largest city in the country. The approximately 20,000 Indian residents of Masaya, who lived in particularly poor conditions in the Monimbó district, rose up on February 20, 1978. The indigenous people, who mostly farm in small gardens, were 65 percent illiterate , and they were often ill. There was a lack of electricity, water and sewer pipes in the entire district. Despite having only a few machetes , fireworks and a few pistols, the indigenous people began barricading their village without any guidance . After a good week, the superior force of the Somoza National Guard put down the desperate resistance of the population with massive use of force. Somoza only used foreign mercenaries for the street fighting in Monimbó, Cubans in exile, Vietnamese, around 300 South Koreans, most of whom had been recruited through advertisements in US newspapers. Around 50 of them died in and around Monimbó, while the Indians complained about 343 dead, mostly defenseless women and children. To protect their families from the reprisals threatened by Somoza, many women took the wounded and killed defenders to the nearby mountains as soon as possible. The Monimbó uprising had to fail because any help from outside, if at all, arrived much too late and was initially barely noticed by the international public. Nevertheless, the will of the Nicaraguan people to revolt could not be suppressed by the suppression in Monimbó. On the contrary, Monimbó became a national beacon .
Manuel García Moia , who himself was born in this Indian district and grew up there in very poor conditions, dealt with this murderous civil war trauma in his anti-war mural Nicaraguan Village - Monimbó 1978 . Monimbó, that was and is also a prominent place of origin and maintenance of the traditional folk art of Nicaragua.
It was worth mentioning and at the same time sad that a history of armed repression in this small village was repeated after 30 years under the government of the Sandinista Daniel Ortega who brought about the overthrow of the dictator Somoza in 1979 and then for the first time co-determined the fate of the country in the junta , see Protests against the Ortega government 2018 .
Art conservation initiative and restoration of the image
The mural was in a poor state of preservation in autumn 2003; the house had since been privatized after the fall of the Wall . The new owner wanted the epochal image to disappear under the planned thermal insulation of the house during the renovation. After a long and persistent struggle, a specially founded Berlin art initiative achieved that, with the support of many citizens and won supporters and sponsors, this extraordinary work of art was not lost. With the consent of the Nicaraguan creator and the house owner, it was possible to initiate the rescue of the mural in summer 2004. After the original had been precisely and systematically recorded in drawings, photographs and by tracing individual details, the Kreuzberg artist Gerd Wulff and his Hamburg colleague Max Michael Holst repainted the painting, largely true to the workmanship and color, on the gable wall of the house, which had previously been renovated with special layers . It has been artistically reproduced. In this way, the original image has been preserved under the insulation layer. The costs for the entire art preservation project amounted to more than 100,000 euros, around 20 percent of which came from public grants from the district office or the Senate Department for Culture and around 80 percent from sponsorship and donation money generated by the initiative in its numerous public activities . After its ceremonial handover, the artistic reproduction has shone in new colors since September 30, 2005 at the same location.
Summer 2013 - the mural is gone
In 2011 the renewed painting began to slowly deteriorate, with large areas crumbling over and over again. Cars were damaged and passers-by were hit. The gable painting had to be completely removed in summer 2013 for safety reasons, the remaining area was completely painted over with white paint. The house owner Manfred Meier is responsible for the work of art. At first there was a dispute about the cause of the disintegration, including the renovation company and the paint manufacturer. The then Lichtenberg mayor Andreas Geisel saw the well-known mural as a figurehead for the district and held a consensus meeting in the town hall on August 19, 2013 . The cost of a new copy was estimated at around 150,000 euros and it should arise by 2014. As it turned out, nothing happened for a long time, only the active citizens' initiative preservation of the Nicaragua gable wall painting was repeatedly effective in the public eye and also collected 10,000 euros in donations. In the summer of 2015, the original picture was first exposed again and its condition examined. Experts from construction service companies, together with the architect Christoph Schwan and representatives of the citizens' initiative, advised whether it should be renovated or completely removed and replaced with a new copy. The architect estimated around 300,000 euros for the renovation, others put a new copy, which would be applied to the completely chipped fire gable, at 53,000 euros. Nothing had been decided in September 2015.
Assigning a name to the place in front of the mural
Exactly on the Nicaraguan artist's 70th birthday, the area between the Lichtenberger Brücke and the urban art ensemble was officially named Monimbóplatz. With the support of City Leuchtwerbung Berlin and Vattenfall Europe , another follow-up project to the initiative was carried out on November 15, 2006: the Nicaragua gable mural was illuminated by four floor lights in the evening and night. The electricity costs incurred could still be paid for by the end of 2008 from the remaining donations.
A brick pillar on Monimbóplatz, erected and designed by the citizens' initiative, which successfully brought about the first rescue of the painting, provides information about the development of the painting, about the painter and names the supporters and sponsors that the initiative won.
Perspective for the mural
The Lichtenberg district office initially has an insured sum of 49,000 euros available for a second restoration after the litigation has been won. However, since a renewal is estimated to cost at least 103,000 euros, donations had to be collected and sponsors found. The former local politician Christel Schemel, who has already won the Nicaraguan ambassador and the members of the Bundestag Gesine Lötzsch (Die Linke) and Hans-Christian Ströbele (Greens) as supporters, is at the head of the campaign, which is part of the Kulturring in Berlin eV . Funding with public money is also being considered. The Berlin Monument Authority at the request of the citizens' initiative to check for possible conservation carried out and found that after a new restoration that could be granted probably positive. Nothing had happened by mid-2018, and there were no statements in this regard in the district office's press releases. In 2019, among others, the Howoge housing association found itself to support a new reproduction. The gable wall was scaffolded in June 2019 and work is scheduled to start on August 9th of that year.
Web links
- Georg Brozek: Solidarity connects. The rescue of naive art from Nicaragua is getting closer , Kulturnews on www.kulturring.org, October 2015.
Individual evidence
- ↑ Some biographical details on David Kunzle (English) ; accessed on August 8, 2018.
- ^ David Kunzle, English art historian; January 2005, in his letter to the then Governing Mayor of Berlin, Klaus Wowereit
- ↑ Birgitt Eltzel: The missing village. The Nicaragua mural in Lichtenberg had to be removed. It is unclear whether it will be reapplied. In: Berliner Zeitung , August 6, 2013, p. 19.
- ↑ Will the original disappear again? . In: Berliner Woche , September 16, 2015, p. 2.
- ↑ Karolina Wrobel: The picture of the painter Manuel Garcia Moia is to be reproduced again , in Berliner Woche , June 11, 2016.
- ↑ Press release of the Lichtenberg District Office of May 9, 2016: The Senate is examining - Monument protection for Nicaragua murals? , accessed again on July 26, 2018.
- ↑ Painting will be new again soon . In: Berliner Zeitung . July 18, 2019, p. 10 (Berllin page).
Coordinates: 52 ° 30 ′ 41.9 ″ N , 13 ° 30 ′ 6.3 ″ E