Vandalism as Symbolic Reparation

The 2018 anti-government protests in Nicaragua generated a vast amount of photographic imagery, video documentation, and visual graphics. On the street via social media, everyday citizens engaged with this material, activating multisensory environment. production content was nonetheless accompanied by iconoclastic gestures; vandalism became means reclaiming Nicaragua’s revolutionary past its symbols, while deploying them towards making yet to be imagined political future. Drawing on examples from Chile Mexico, article argues that acts may understood as symbolically reparative. materiality protests, manifested through image, trace, gesture, sound (slogans, chants, noise) becomes analysing, ethnographically, imaginaries caught within flux an unsettled present.