Haunting History
Ghosts of the Unresolved in Contemporary Central American Art
Beatriz Cortez, Armadura para Rufina Amaya (Armor for Rufina Amaya, 2014)
Courtesy of the artist
Held on 28 Nov 2025
Curator Patricio Majano invites writer Elena Salamanca, artist Beatriz Cortez and artist and writer Olivier Marboeuf to explore, in conversation, the political agency of artistic forms in relation to the spectral resonances in Central America, the Caribbean, and their diasporas.
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?
Over the course of 2025, these questions have articulated the research residency of Salvadoran curator Patricio Majano in the The Cáder Institute of Central American Art (ICAC) by virtue of the project Amputated Identities: Ghosts in Salvadoran Art. Majano’s research traces genealogies and resonances between Salvadoran contemporary art, the Indigenous genocide of 1932 and the Civil War (1980–1992), interrogating how these unresolved forms of violence operate with artistic subject matter.
Beyond a closing act of the ICAC residency, this encounter stresses exchange and dialogue as method: opening the process and sharing questions, tensions and unresolved challenges — not as conclusions, but as work in progress.
Inside the framework of
Curator
Patricio Majano
Organised by
Museo Reina Sofía and the Museo Reina Sofía Foundation
Participants
Beatriz Cortez
is an artist and academic. Born in San Salvador (El Salvador) and living and working in Los Angeles and Davis (USA), her work explores simultaneity — life in different temporalities and inopportune moments — and speculative imaginaries. Cortez has held solo exhibitions and been part of collective shows at The Americas Society in New York (2025), the Venice Biennale (2024), the Shanghai Biennale (2024), the Commonwealth and Council in Mexico City (2024) and Los Angeles (2022), and at the Storm King Art Center in New Windsor, among others. Her work is part of different collections, including the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles, Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), the El Paso Museum of Art, Ford Foundation, New York, The Institute of Contemporary Art, San Diego, and the Mohn Art Collective (MAC3), made up of the Hammer Museum, LACMA and MOCA, collection.
Patricio Majano
is a curator and cultural manager. With a degree in Plastic Arts from the University of El Salvador, his work focuses on the artistic practices of Central America and its diaspora, in relation to the political emergencies in the region. Majano’s career has been chiefly developed in El Salvador’s artistic sphere: as curator and director of the programme Y.ES Contemporary, a pioneering platform in promoting contemporary art; as a lecturer at the School of Arts at the University of El Salvador; and as a collaborator with education programmes at the Museo de Arte de El Salvador (MARTE) and the Museo Forma in San Salvador, respectively. He is the 2025 resident researcher at the The Cáder Institute of Central American Art (ICAC) in the Museo Reina Sofía, and is part of ICAC’s Advisory Committee.
Olivier Marboeuf
is an artist, narrator, independent curator, cultural theorist and film producer from Guadalupe. He explores an array of themes — imperialism, servitude and slavery, the consequences of racial oppression — in his practice, starting out from postcolonial theories, understood as indispensable tools to put into practice emancipatory strategies. Thus, more than just revisiting the past, he looks to open new forms of narrating and representing history. In the 1990s he founded Amok, a comic book publisher, with artist and writer Yvan Alagbé. From 2004 to 2018 he was the artistic director of Espace Khiasma, a space for promoting the visual arts and literature in Les Lilas (France), and from 2013 to 2024 he focused on making audiovisual work, producing over sixty films and documentaries about artists with Spectre Productions.
Elena Salamanca
is a historian, writer and curator of Salvadoran art who lives in Mexico City, where she is a PhD candidate in History at the Colegio de México. She has published four bilingual editions of her poetry work: La familia o el olvido/Family or Oblivion (2017), Tal vez monstruos/Monsters Maybe (2022), Landsmoder (2022) and [Incognita Flora Cuscatlanica] (2025). Salamanca is the creator, author, researcher and coordinator of the children’s literature collection Siemprevivas. Mujeres extraordinarias en la historia de El Salvador (2020–2022), and has also received, on two occasions, in 2015 and 2023, the LLILAS Benson research grant from the Teresa Lozano Long Institute of Latin American Studies at the University of Texas. Her most recent book is Des-Bordadas. Cruces entre prácticas artísticas y cultura política. Mujeres en Centroamérica, siglos XVIII-XXI (Universidad Rafael Landívar, Guatemala).
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