Un Pasado Que Aún Vive (A Past That Still Lives Here) (2004) by Joel Bergner

Un Passado que aun Vive is painted with dominating hues of red and yellow, emanating a powerful heated energy with exquisite detail which gives alley visitors an intricate puzzle to decode.
Just as Lévi-Strauss comments on his trip to the Brazilian Amazon, “We will always walk with our past,” (Lévi-Strauss 1974: 44) Bergner’s symbolic depiction of a woman whose family has been torn apart from the civil war in El Salvador, places human identity in inextricable relation to his roots. Within the shadows of a contemporary landscape— the mountainsides, river, streets, and walls of the pupuserias—are the “collective memories” of the Salvadoran Civil War, which “disrupted order and killed the innocent” (Gressel 2009:111) from 1980-1992. American involvement in the war was immensely controversial, and Bergner’s piece pays tribute to the original PLACA project with this topic.

Source: Joel Bergner