información
bio
Franco Castilla is a Nicaraguan-born artist and educator living in Los Angeles. He holds a BFA in painting and printmaking from Virginia Commonwealth University and an MFA in painting and drawing from the Ohio State University. He currently teaches in the General Education and Cinema departments at California College of Arizona State University. He has exhibited his work in venues throughout the Los Angeles area including LACE, elephant, Monte Vista Projects, LAST Projects, and the Angels Gate Cultural Center.
artist statement
I explore power relations, the collision and negotiations of ideologies, and struggles for autonomy and agency. I am interested in the use of architecture and built environments, industrial and military equipment, and media technologies to visually organize the world in relation to power and ideological beliefs. I consider the exertion of power by governments and institutions through policies, accords, and brute force and examine the counter hegemonic responses by communities, families, and individuals ingrained in self-preservation. I contemplate on the disruption and destabilization of nature and humanity caused by the excesses of free-market capitalism, the Industrial Revolution and the Digital Age, unfettered colonialism and imperialism, and asymmetrical neo-liberal policies leading to acute consolidations of power, staggering economic inequality, mass over-production and consumption, environmental degradation, and the military industrial complex. I look to the ways in which the introduction of new technologies including the internal combustion engine, the camera, the Internet, and, more recently, artificial intelligence are being employed to exert power using military and industrial equipment, electronic and digital surveillance, disinformation and propaganda, and the mediation of violence. I draw from subaltern social groups and classes as they begin to rise to dominance confronting the existing hegemony. I take influence from Antonio Gramsci’s notions of subalternity, common sense and hidden transcripts, and the emergence of organic intellectuals. The subalterns, those who are oppressed by the ruling class and mentally subordinated with fear and humiliation, share a class common sense, which contains the seeds for new political narratives, and speak a hidden transcript, a subversive critique of power whispered behind the back of the dominant class. The organic intellectuals emerge from within the subaltern class, and it is through dialogue between organic intellectuals and the subalterns that they create coherent political narratives with the power to inspire collective action and social transformation. I draw on personal memories of my family’s displacement from Nicaragua due to the 1979 revolution sparked by the Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional and our arrival as immigrants in the United States exploring a process of assimilation and personal reconstitution as naturalized American citizens. My work delves into Nicaragua’s struggles for autonomy taking into account Spanish colonialism and it’s eventual downfall in 1821. I examine American imperialist interventions beginning in the 1850s facilitated by the Monroe Doctrine of 1823 and the emergence of Manifest Destiny in the 1840s. I reflect on William Walker declaring himself president of Nicaragua in 1856 and his eventual assassination, Augusto Sandino’s guerrilla resistance against U.S. occupation in the 1920s, the corrupt and oppressive 46-year Somoza family dictatorship, and the U.S. backed Contras fighting the communist FSLN in the 1980s. I contemplate on Nicaragua’s current political situation where the FSLN are back in power as a tyrannical regime repressing freedom of speech and civil liberties.