Professor Beatriz Cortez, writer Elena Salamanca and artist and writer Olivier Marboeuf explore the political agency of artistic forms in relation to the spectral resonances in Central America, the Caribbean, and their diasporas in a conversation with curator Patricio Majano. “Haunting History: Ghosts of the Unresolved in Contemporary Central American Art” will take place on Friday, Nov. 28 at 6 pm (UTC/GMT or 9 am PST) at the Museo Reina Sofia in Madrid. This event will also be available via zoom.

Central America is a region inhabited by spectres that continually interrupt any attempt at historical closure. Five centuries of colonisation, counterinsurgency wars, genocides, dictatorships and deportations have resulted in accumulated traumas and persistent forms of violence that still move around under the surface of the present. More than past ruins, these spectres are material forces which persist, invade and reclaim the reparation and reconfiguration of the frameworks of historical legibility. In Central American artistic practice, these spectral presences become method, counter-archive and counter-pedagogy.

Taking El Salvador as both axis and prism, this conference seeks to think about “ghostliness”, not as a metaphor but as a political and aesthetic technology, from the following questions: How is that which persists beyond disappearance manifested? Who speaks from amputation? How does memory operate when the State apparatus has systematically searched for its erasure? How is the spectral tapped into as a form of resistance? Which conditions and methods allow art to articulate a claim, reparation and justice when hegemonic narratives are upheld in denial?

Friday, Nov. 28, 6:00 pm. (UTC/GMT)
Watch live (9 am PST) online here.