Every Catastrophe to Come

Michelle Campos Castillo reflects on living through an earthquake as a child in El Salvador.

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The Spanish word for earthquake, terremoto, combines the Latin noun terre (the Earth) and the participle motus, meaning movement. Motus has initially contradictory qualities that merge inspiration, concern and torment. Michelle Campos Castillo’s three murals, on view at Latitude 53 in Edmonton until Sept. 12, embody the tension of being both troubled and in a childlike state of awe. 

These feelings of inspiration and distress originate from the artist’s childhood experience of the 1986 El Salvador earthquake that killed some 1,500 people and left 200,000 homeless. Born in the country’s capital, San Salvador, she was just three when the 5.7-magnitude quake struck the city, leaving her with a blurred and romanticized memory of the disaster. 

In returning to the event for her exhibition, she interviewed family members, incorporating the variations and overlaps of traumatic memories into the running narrative of her paintings.

Her work as an illustrator with an interest in comic arts makes Terremoto a narrative and textual experience as much as a visual one. An initial text-based painting serves as a frank and factual introduction, dispassionately listing the location, date, time, magnitude and duration of the earthquake. The responses to these categories are larger and painted in angled strokes that suggest a geologist’s unsteady pencil or the ink of a seismograph.

The illustrations and text of the two main murals complement one another as two sides of a fragment. In combination, they create feelings of childlike unawareness and uncertainty. 

The murals began with a black background. Afterwards, outlined plants, figures in hammocks and crowds, and the narrative text were drawn on top in pale yellow and turquoise, colours reminiscent of a classroom chalkboard. 

At times, the Edmonton-based artist depicts her younger self in an undisturbed state, wearing an Alf T-shirt and smiling even though, as viewers, we know she is surrounded by devastation. In one illustration, a small written note with a playful arrow points out that the food a person is holding is a bean sandwich.

Above and below these illustrations, the Spanish and English first-person narration offers unseen recollections of the earthquake – from ironic feelings of safety to the way childhood memories merge and fade over time. The fragments of image and text create psychical moments of being out of control in the world, but reassured by those closest to us.

As we wade through our current collective catastrophe, Terremoto is a reminder that art continues to be a conduit for connection and empathy. Our personal disasters can never be fully understood by others, but neither are they completely unknowable. We draw upon other understandings of suffering, as the artist writes in her mural, in order to make it “through each and every catastrophe to come.” ■ 

Terremoto is on view at Latitude 53 in Edmonton from July 24 to Sept. 12, 2020.

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