Mario Cáder-Frech

The Cáder Institute of Central American Art (ICAC) is an organization dedicated to the study, research, and dissemination of the practices, scenes, and histories of Central American art and its diasporas. It is housed within the Department of Studies at the Museo Reina Sofía. Its work unfolds across multiple programs and tempos: on the one hand, it seeks to contribute to the enrichment of knowledge about the art of this region through the Museum’s Collections, Library, residencies, and study programs; on the other, it aims to weave dialogues, collaborations, and connections based on reciprocity with the cultural scene in Central America. This is a pioneering initiative in its field, not only for giving visibility to a region historically overlooked by historiography, but also for advancing ways of working that, through structural imagination and research, generate lasting networks and projects. 

This capsule inaugurates one of the Institute’s initiatives, which seeks to shape a possible oral history of contemporary Central American art. Through a constellation of voices from the fields of artistic creation, research, curating, and cultural management, this project gathers a mosaic of perspectives and experiences around different episodes that have defined local and regional scenes in recent decades. It also brings together testimonies on individual and collective practices that help outline the range of aesthetic languages and currents of thought that define this territory. In this tentative history—born from conversation, orality, and listening, and avoiding any totalizing ambition—there lies a need to seek more porous, mutable, and affective ways of constructing narratives, creating archives, and generating interpretive communities around them. 

In this first series, titled Building the Cáder Institute of Central American Art, we explore the process behind the creation of the ICAC and its main predecessor, the Y.ES Contemporary Institute—an organization that, over the past decade, has been a key reference point in energizing contemporary art in El Salvador. Neither project would have been possible without the initiative, support, and involvement of Mario Cáder-Frech, who is featured in the first capsule of this series.