Muriel Hasbun - U.S. Scholar to El Salvador
Field: Photography
Home Institution: Corcoran College of Art + Design
Here and There: Forging Relationships Across Borders, Cultures and Generations
Through an intergenerational, transnational and transcultural lens, my photo-based work will serve as backdrop and catalyst for a living, collaborative, and creative exchange with a community, fashioning new frameworks about individual and collective identity and place.
Muriel Hasbun (left) speaking with workshop participants at the Centro Cultural de España, San Salvador, 2006.
Photo by participant Lizzette Marenco.
When I returned from my Fulbright residency in El Salvador, I considered how I might bridge the distance between the stories of my fellow Salvadorans living “there” and those of the Salvadoran community in the Washington, D.C. area. Through my work, I create correspondences between “here” and “there”, between past and present, and between the individual memories shared in the intimacy of one’s family, informing our sense of self, and the collective histories that shape our national identities and our sense of place and belonging. I originally left El Salvador in 1980, as a young 17-year old, carrying within me a familial legacy of other diasporas and wars. The United States became my second home.
Workshop participant, Suchitoto, El Salvador, 2007.
Photo by Corcoran student Caleb Churchill.
Defining my terruño –or sense of homeland—has become one of the subjects of my work and an extension of myself. It is indeed an opportunity to create interactive and collaborative spaces for dialogue about identity and place, where photographs, documents and their constructed narratives guide us in journeys across borders, cultures, and generations.
FotoViajeros group, Aguacayo, El Salvador, 2007. Photograph by Corcoran professor Susan Sterner.
As part of this effort, in 2007, I taught a seminar and travel-oriented course called “El Salvador: International Experience / Transnational Identity” at the Corcoran College of Art + Design. Eight students, another faculty member and I modeled ourselves after the viajeros, individuals who travel back and forth between El Salvador and different U.S. cities, transporting and delivering letters, food and money to family members across borders. As FotoViajeros, we learned about the history and culture of El Salvador; heard from photographers who had worked in El Salvador during the civil war as well as within the current 500,000 Salvadoran immigrant community living in the Washington, DC area; discussed issues of migration, cultural identity and contemporary photography; and conducted photography workshops for children “there,” in our base in the small town of Suchitoto, and “here,” at the Corcoran Gallery of Art’s Gallery 31, where we exhibited the images culled from our experience in El Salvador.
Workshop participant, Washington, DC, 2008.
Photo by Fulbright Scholar and Corcoran professor Muriel Hasbun.
In the process, we began to answer some of the questions that I had posed during my Fulbright grant: How do we acknowledge and give voice to those who regardless of where they might find themselves, remember always from “over there”? How do we construct our identity in multiple places and multiple languages at once? How does the experience of dislocation and relocation influence one’s perception of self? While the Suchitoto sixth graders talked about the photos of their loved ones, perhaps some living in the United States, they also imagined the possibilities for their future: “Quiero ser doctora,” said one young girl, dreaming of being a doctor. And, as if in the same breath, a few months later, we listened to the voices of recent immigrant girls to Silver Spring, MD, pondering the path of the “American dream” yet so far away from their cherished grandparents back home. The children’s voices merged together in one space and I imagined a thread drawing them closer together and tracing their collective journey on the territory that their families have traveled, back and forth, both here and there.
Yo viajo, interactive installation by Muriel Hasbun, in FotoViajeros exhibition, Gallery 31 at the Corcoran, 2008.
Photo by Susan Sterner.
In 2008-09, I will teach the course in two parts, a seminar component in the fall and a travel and studio module in the spring, to encourage exchange and lasting bonds between our students and the Salvadoran community at-large, and to allow for a deeper exploration of the transnational and international networks that exist in the greater Washington, D.C. area and in El Salvador itself. Look for the second installment of the FotoViajeros exhibition in 2009!
FotoViajeros exhibition, Gallery 31 at the Corcoran, 2008.
Photo by Susan Sterner.
Muriel Hasbun is a 2006-07 Fulbright Scholar. Her project Terruño: detrás del telón / Backdrop: A Search for Home consisted of an exhibition of her work and a series of workshops on photography and family history, held at the Centro Cultural de España and at the Museo Nacional de Antropología in San Salvador, El Salvador in 2006. Recent exhibitions include the American University Museum in Washington, DC (2008); NYU’s Hemispheric Institute and the Centro Cultural Recoleta in Buenos Aires (2007); the Museum of Photographic Arts in San Diego (2007); Houston’s FotoFest (2006); the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, DC (2004); and the 50th Venice Biennale (2003). She is Interim Chair and Associate Professor of Photography at the Corcoran College of Art + Design.
Read about Muriel's class
at the Corcoran School and their two week trip to El Salvador that culminated in an art show centered on the theme of translation.
To the U.S.- El Salvador Fulbright Program