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PÅ HOVEDET I EN NY VERDEN

Ida Ferdinand boede i to år, fra 2000 til 2002, i Managua i Nicaragua, sammen med sin familie. Hun var på forhånd indstillet på at lade opholdet påvirke hendes arbejde som kunstner.
Jeg kom til Nicaragua med min europæiske farve­skala, med den formelle tilgang til kunst, som jeg har rendyrket på forskellige måder, og jeg kom til det der totale kaos. Den måde man bruger farven på i en by som Managua, maler husene i de folkelige kvarterer og om-maler de amerikanske skole­busser, som kører rundt overalt, det er striber, der siger spar to. Det er skrigende fremmedartet, uhæmmet og meget lidt de rene farver. Jeg tænkte, hold da op, det er godt fundet på, det kunne jeg ikke konstruere mig frem til.

Ida Ferdinand fotograferede byens huse, gader og på markedspladser, og mens hun formmæssigt fortsatte sit arbejde med striber og prikker, begynd­te hun at omsætte det offentlige rums farvesammen­stød i sit maleri:
For mig er der en snæver sammenhæng mellem sansning og udtryk, og det afspejledes både i de farver, jeg bragte, og i mit valg af titler på mine værker. Et af de store billeder, jeg lavede i Managua, kaldte jeg Bello Horizonte, den smukke horisont. En sådan banal titel ville jeg aldrig have fundet i Danmark, men i Managua er det navnet på en folkelig bydel, som jeg færdedes meget i, så titlen er en binding til den sansning, der var forud­sætningen for maleriet. I Bello Horizonte er der bestemt ingen traditionel smuk horisont, men sna­rere hvad man kunne kalde tilfældets overrasken­de æstetik, så. titlen er dobbelttydig.
Hun var naturligvis optaget af hvorledes den fol­kelige kolorit gik igen i kunsten, i maleriet, men oplevede her et farvevalg, der virkede helt anderle­des postuleret, og ikke nær så raffineret som i by­ens palet. Selv om hun ikke syntes, hun kunne bruge kunstnernes arbejdsmetoder, ville hun dog gerne i kontakt med de lokale kunstnere for om muligt at presse sit eget arbejde i nye retning­er. Her blev mødet med gruppen Arte Facto og Patricia Belli vigtig:

Det blev et meget dynamisk møde, med en sanse­lig, næsten vulgær og meget lidenskabelig kunst. Jeg lavede en udstilling sammen med Patricia Belli udfra en fælles optagethed af det folkelige udtryk. Jeg var det koloristisk, og hun var det narrativt. Det gælder generelt for den latinameri­kanske kunst, at den er langt mere narrativ end den, jeg kommer fra, og det var typisk, at når folk så mine billeder, spurgte de: Hvad refererer du til, hvilken erindring vil du bearbejde?
Mødet med de nicaraguanske kunstnere og deres værker har for Ida Ferdinand rejst mange spørgs­mål, som hun stadig kredser om:

Som kunstnere ønsker vi jo at stille nogle kvali­tetskrav til os selv og andre, som er ens, men jeg kan ikke finde ud af, hvordan jeg skal stille dem, for jeg kan ikke aflæse deres kunst, der er meget af det jeg ikke forstår f.eks. brugen af symboler. Men når en herboende udenlandsk kunstner siger til mig, at nordisk kunst er mindst ligeså plaget af symbolik som den latinamerikanske, og at hans skuldre blev tynget til jorden af den symbolske byrde - så bliver jeg nysgerrig. Vi er mangelfuldt udrustede til at se på os selv og til at se, hvilke symboler vi bruger, derfor er det vigtigt med den spejling fra andre sider at udfordre og tage de møder med verden omkring os.

Cand. mag. Tove Nyholm, 2004

Nicaragua Painting

I lived in Nicaragua for two years. Meeting the exotic and foreign world made me rethink my expression. Oil-tempera on thin aluminum sheets in rigid grid and wild colours.

UPSIDE DOWN IN A DIFFERENT WORLD

For a period of two years, from 2000 to 2002, Ida Ferdinand lived with her family in Managua, Nica­ragua. Setting out from Denmark, she was deter­mined to let herself be influenced by Nicaraguan traditions.
I came to Nicaragua with a range of colors be­longing to Northern Europe and a distinctly formal approach to art, a tradition which I have also pur­sued in my own work in various ways — and I arrived in utter chaos. In Managua colors are different: the way they paint the American school buses, which are everywhere, or the way they paint their houses in the different parts of the city. Their colors are alien, strange and uninhibited. You seldom come across a clear and distinct colorings. I found this overwhelming. I saw something which I could not have imagined.
Ida Ferdinand would take photographs of Mana­gua n houses and streets and in market places. From a formal point of view, she staved with her accustomed dots and stripes, vet she also initiated a process of importing the colors clash in public space in her paintings:

I have always focused on what I see as an intima­te link between perception and expression. This connection is reflected both in the colors I use and in my choice of titles for individual works. One of the large paintings 1 made in Managua is called Bello Horizonte. The title is trivial, and it would never have occurred to me in Denmark. But Bello Horizonte refers to a popular part of the citywhere I used to come, so it is linked to a particu­lar perception prior to actually painting the pictu­re. In Bello Horizonte there is quite emphatically no beautiful horizon. Instead you see something which one might term the aesthetics of surprise. So the title is ambiguous.
Naturally, Ida Ferdinand preoccupied herself with the way the popular use of color was incor­porated into Nicaraguan paintings, hut here she discovered a choice of colors that appeared to her artificial and not nearly as ingenious as what she saw in the cityscape. She felt, therefore, that the confrontation with Nicaraguan methods in art might not be so very productive after all. Neverthe­less, she did want to meet local artists to possibly push her own work in a new direction, and meeting Arte Facto and Patricia Belli was a turning point.

To me this meeting was highly dynamic - confron­ting a sensuous, perhaps vulgar but certainly a very passionate form of art. Patricia Belli and I were both intrigued by popular expression and this mutuality of interest resulted in a common exhibi­tion. I was looking around for color, while she was interested in narration. It is a general feature of Latin American art that it depends much more on narration than where I come from. When people saw my paintings they would ask: What do they refer to? What memory are you trying to recall?

Confronting the work of the Nicaraguan artists did result in posing various worthwhile questions. Thus Ida Ferdinand feels that she is still groping around in her approach to their different ways.
As artists we do claim, after all, that both they and we should meet certain standards shared by both parties. But in this case I wouldn’t know how to enforce such standards, since I don’t really respond to their art: there is too much in it that 1 simply don’t understand. A foreign artist living in this country tells me that Nordic art is no less con­founded by symbols than is Latin American art. On first arriving in Denmark he experienced the use of symbols as cumbersome, weighing him down. So I am curious. We only have limited access to our own work and the symbols we rely on. It is vital, therefore, that our work is reflected in places and circumstances different from our own.

Cand. mag. Tove Nyholm, 2004