Emilia Yang: Archival Mediations: Art, Community, and Political Action at Queen Sofia Museum

On April 23, 2026, Stamps Assistant Professor Emilia Yang will participate in Mediations of the Archive: Art, Community, and Political Action, an online seminar curated by Sofía Villena Araya. The seminar examines the role of archival practices in caring for, dignifying, and activating memory in Central America. As part of the Cáder Institute for Central American Art’s first line of research, driven by the question ​“What Art Histories does Central America produce?”, this seminar proposes an approach to the archive as a mediator that articulates relationships between art, community, and political action, while engaging with the historiographical questions raised by their intersections.

Yang will participate in the seminar’s first session, Archives that move us: memory, conflict, and the affective persuasion of art, with Carlos Henríquez Consalvi (known as Santiago), Ileana Rodríguez, and moderator Sofía Villena Araya.

This seminar situates itself within the tension between the factual archive and lived history. Drawing on episodes of violence in Central America, it explores concrete cases of institutional imaginaries of memory and archives, while also reflecting on the capacity of art to intervene in the political sphere when legal and official mechanisms prove insufficient.