Neotropica: new Costa Rican magazine seeks writers

cover of Neotropica's first issue

Excerpts from a 15th-century account of Christopher Columbus “discovering paradise” in the New World. A philosophical rumination on “Before Paradise was Necessary.” A report on what expats in Costa Rica think about their Central American paradise, illustrated with images from Alice in Wonderland.

Neotropica is not your average travel magazine. The beautifully designed first issue, titled “Imagined Geographies of Paradise,” is a headlong plunge into history, myth, and culture. Available online, the magazine is laid out like a full-color academic journal, lavishly illustrated with photographs, prints from old trip journals, and reproductions of paintings, like Spanish painter Remedios Varo’s haunting and surreal “Exploration of the Source of the Orinoco.”

Founder and Editor-in-Chief Stephen Duplantier says he hopes Neotropica becomes “a widely-read journal of important ideas for all of Central America. The region is diverse and the archaeologies, histories, and traditions are thickly layered.”

"Exploration of the Source of the Orinoco," a painting by Remedios Varo

Duplantier and his wife Kathleen moved from Louisiana to the hills above San Ramon, Costa Rica, in 2004. Back home, he earned a PhD in journalism and and an MS in film and wrote extensively on Louisiana history and folk life. Duplantier also produced ethnographic films about the music and food of French Louisiana.

Now he turns his gaze on his new home—Central America—with the same learned and omnivorous curiosity that he once applied to Louisiana.

Duplantier says he’s seeking Central American artists, writers, and thinkers to help make Neotropica come alive, though at this point the magazine is a collaborative effort that hasn’t been paying its participants.

Dominican priest Bartolomé de las Casas chronicled the adventures and abuses of Christopher Columbus and other conquistadores

“This is a time for sharing and understanding,” says Duplantier. “We are looking for contributions in Spanish, English, and French that deal with our contested histories, and that try to understand 500 years of colonization. We’re in this together. What can we make of our lives in Central America?”

The second issue of Neotropica will be called The Banana Chronicles, and the 3rd, says Duplantier, will be “an archaeological dig to uncover buried ghosts, disappeared histories, and disappeared bodies of Central America’s past.”

Email Stephen Duplantier at editorneotropica@gmail.com

Read Neotropica online

Sunday in Alajuela: jazz and wild art

Going to be in Alajuela (Costa Rica) this Sunday? At noon at Vista del Valle Plantation Inn there will be jazz and an auction of Michael Cranford’s paintings. Mike is the treehouse-building, RainForest Aid-producing dynamo from the Osa Peninsula. That same night at the Inn, there’s a presentation about the environmental crisis surrounding the Osa’s waterways.

Check out Mike’s work:

Michael Cranford's "First Flight of the Lapa"

Michael Cranford's "Dos Capitanes"

Michael Cranford's "Mid-day Snack"

Michael Cranford's "Over a Barrell Waterfall in Costa Rica"

My new agouti: woodcarving in the Solentiname Islands

A wooden agouti, carved by Concepción Garcia of Isla La Venada, one of the Solentiname islands

At the artisan cooperative on San Fernando Island, I fell in love with a pint-sized agouti. An oversized rodent that also goes by the names tepesquintle and guardatinaja, the agouti is cuter than its bloodline implies.

I liked the paintings, was intrigued by the painted birds and turtles, but the unpainted agouti, of cedar (not like the Pacific Northwest cedar) instead of the usual balsa, was the only item that convinced me it’d be worth carting around for the rest of my trip.

The creator of the agouti is a 39-year-old woman named Concepción Garcia. She lives on a modest farm on Isla La Venada (Deer Island), which, unlike San Fernando and Mancarron Islands, doesn’t have a town. She’s married to a Mosquito Indian man, has 3 children, and says she chose to work with wood instead of paint because paint is too expensive. She carves with a machete-like knife and has been at it for less than 5 years. I bought her agouti from the artist’s cooperative, and asked there where I could find the artist.

House of woodcarver Concepción Garcia, Isla La Venada, Solintename Archipeligo, Nicaragua

We took our boat to Isla La Venada, calling to people on the shore, asking where we could find Concepción Garcia.

When we found her, up a narrow path from the lakeshore, she was very gracious, and brought out a bag of birds and other carved animals. None of them approached the agouti in charm, but I bought a few anyway, because we had disturbed her at home and because she obviously needed the money. She told us she didn’t get that much of the money when the artist’s cooperative sold her work.

Woodcarver Concepción Garcia, in her home on Isla La Venada in the Solentiname Islands

All photos by David W. Smith.

3000 wooden birds a month in Solentiname

In my last post I wrote about radical poet-priest Ernesto Cardinal coming to the remote Solentiname Islands in the 1970s and fostering a climate of political activism and creativity that still endures today.  I posted the oil-on-canvas paintings of the islands in that last post.

The islands are also known for their wood carvings.

The head of the artists’ cooperative in the Solentiname Islands showed us a brightly painted wooden bird smaller than my hand. He said the bird had been a godsend to the local woodcarvers.  An importer from Holland wanted  2500 – 3000 of them every month. All the same, with all the same colors.

“I don’t know why they wanted so many, and all the same,” said the manager of the cooperative. “But it was good for the artists. They were paid 20 cordobas (about a dollar) a bird.”

The bird boomlet is over for now. December 2009 was the last month  the Dutch clients wanted that many of the little blue-bodied balsawood birds.

wooden birds, Solentiname Island, Nicaragua

Balsa wood carved turtles from the Solentiname Islands in Nicaragua

Photos by David W. Smith.

The naive paintings of Nicaragua’s Solentiname Islands

Drawings in the church on Mancarron Island, one of the Solentiname island; photo by David W. Smith

In 1976 Sandinista poet-priest Ernesto Cardinal came to the remote Solentiname islands in southern Nicaragua. He found a naturally artistic people who weren’t  expressing their creativity, and a devout people who’d never thought Catholicism could speak directly to the conditions of their daily lives.

“Before he came,” said Esparanza Guevara, who showed me around the church on Mancarron Island, “we were Catholic, but we knew nothing of justice and injustice.” Cardinal preached a Sandinista-inflected Catholicism of the poor, and in fact many of Solentiname’s young people caught the fever and left their island sanctuary to flight (and die) in Nicaragua’s Sandinista uprising.

Being an artist himself, Cardinal also encouraged in the islands’ inhabitants a sort of populist creativity that took many forms: the childlike primary-color drawings in the island’s dirt floor church, wood carvings of birds and fish and caimans, and naive paintings of the beautiful islands themselves.

They remind me both of Haitian naive art and the paintings I saw in the Ecuadorian Andes in the 1980s, that the Indians there were making with cheap enamel on stretched sheepskins. The paintings of Solentiname are oil on canvas.

I’d been hearing good things about Solentiname for years, and when we got there I wasn’t disappointed. I don’t often use the word magical, but this little-visited chain of islands in Lake Nicaragua felt that way to me. I’ll post here some of the painting we saw in the islands’ artists cooperative. Many of the artists are women who have few options when it comes to earning a living. The painting were selling for about $100 for small ones to $800 for the larger (36 x 30 inches) ones. All photos are by David Webster Smith.

Nidos de Orupendula (Orupendula Nests), 2009 Solignia Arellana, 34 x 25 inches

Islas de Solentiname (Solentiname Islands), Carmen Madrigal, 36 x 30 inches

El Castillo (The Castle), Miriam Madrigal, 36 x 30 inches

La isla de amor (The Island of Love), Sylvia Arellano

El Rancho, Carmen Madrigal

La Isla (The Island), Fernando Altamirano

Los Cocos 2 (The Coconut Trees 2), Teresa Madrigal

Flora y Fauna, Solignia Arellano

Noche de Armadillos (Night of the Armadillos), Francisco Altamirano