Patricio Majano. Haunting History (audio in Spanish)

This third capsule of Building the ICAC focuses on the 2025 annual research residency of the Cáder Institute of Central American Art, awarded to Patricio Majano. 

Within the framework of his fellowship, Majano has developed a research project titled Frightening History. By proposing new terms such as “amputated identity,” he defines certain phenomena in Salvadoran art as responses to a past marked by sustained violence. According to the researcher, these phenomena are particularly concentrated around two moments in history: the massacre of Indigenous peoples in 1932, and the civil war that devastated the country from 1979 to 1992. These contextual points—or “focal phenomena of violence”—serve as references through which he structures his research around a series of contemporary artworks that function as case studies. 

Beyond the struggle to construct a plural memory capable of resisting forgetting and impunity, another major consequence of violence in El Salvador has been large-scale migration, resulting in a significant Salvadoran diaspora. Taken together, and as Majano explains, El Salvador today brings together artistic projects of a vitality grounded in these historical and social conditions, enabling renewed, critical, and non-reconciled ways of engaging with the past. 

This first series, titled Building the Cáder Institute of Central American Art, explores 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.