This room gathers works by different artists from El Salvador to analyse some of the motifs that were a source of interest in the cultural output of the country and its unique socio-political context. Violence, the history of a bloody civil war and aspects related to the construction of identity form the basis of much of the work of artists from the Central American country. Notable in the room is a desire for the reconstruction of a society also profoundly shaped by emigration, the only alternative for a section of the population threatened by poverty and crime.

In 1992, the long internal armed conflict that had been destabilising the country since the 1970s finally came to an official end with the signing of the Chapultepec Peace Agreements between the El Salvador Government and the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN). The said civil war had been one of the numerous outlying conflicts that had settled the dynamics of Cold War blocs, yet opposite this official history of peace and national reconstruction many artists continued to expose how El Salvador remained within a complex, plural and violence-tarnished context, where strategies of hiding identities existed alongside a recognition of erased roots or with the rereading, oftentimes ironic, of the subaltern role of the area in the complex geopolitics of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Internal citizen tensions and the traumatic migration beyond the country’s borders took on different connotations in a process of painful healing which assays new forms of gazing at and narrating past and present.