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The Fire Theory

The Salvadoran collective The Fire Theory (TFT) was founded in 2010 by Ernesto Bautista in response to an artistic crisis driven by institutional dependency and limited arts funding. These challenges persist in a country still grappling with the aftermath of a US-funded civil war (1980–92) that left over 75,000 dead, 5,000 disappeared, and nearly one million displaced. Current members Mauricio Kabistan, Melissa Guevara, Victor Rodriguez, and Mauricio Esquivel joined soon after. Though born during the conflict, their experiences were shaped more by inherited memories and society’s willful forgetting. They were also living with the results of a failed peace process, unfulfilled promises, and the rise of post-war violence, including gangs, gendered violence, and criminalization. The artists came together with their own artistic trajectories but with a shared conviction for new societal and political growth.

TFT curated their first exhibition at the Museo Municipal Tecleño, a former detention center for political prisoners, amid El Salvador’s shift from right-wing rule to its first left-wing government, which began in 2009. Their studio in San Salvador’s historic center went on to ignite inspiration and community but was later lost through state-led urban redevelopment, mirroring the displacement of local vendors. Now, operating transnationally, TFT’s praxis of guerilla curating, archival research, oral interviews, and community-engaged social practice has become more relevant than ever. Their methodology is grounded in collective personal development and mutual support to compensate for individual skill gaps through collaboration. Dialogue, listening, and respectful engagement with community members is central, allowing their perspectives to be integrated into the work and preserved as testimonies.

Among TFT’s emblematic projects is El Juego (The Game, 2016), a soccer game between massacre survivors, ex-guerrillas, and ex-soldiers who settled in the same community after the war. Having once fought and tried to kill each other, the ex-combatants and soldiers now played on the same team. TFT conducted in-depth archival research and oral interviews, producing a documentary-style video that preserves the co-existence as well as perspectives on the players’ new generational struggles. In Declaración Negada (Denied Declaration, 2018), an attorney documented sworn statements from residents of El Espino, a protected forest reserve in San Salvador, who recounted brutal forced evictions that were carried out to make room for development. As the testimonies were documented, TFT members hung from the museum ceiling with their backs to the audience as a critique of societal indifference, asserting the emotional and legal validity of marginalized voices within an elite artistic space.

TFT projects recover historical memory in order to defy state erasure, highlight marginalized communities whose voices are most ignored, and generate a call for empathy and empowerment through dialogue. Politically and philosophically, they uphold the idea that size is not a measure of impact, as proven by a spark: even the smallest flame can reshape an entire landscape.

Kency Cornejo,
Associate Professor of Latinx/Latin American Art & Expressive Culture at UCLA, is the author of Visual Disobedience: Art and Decoloniality in Central America.