Conciencia Colectiva: En Memoria al Teleférico San Jacinto (Collective Consciousness: In Memory of the Aerial Tramway San Jacinto), 2013
Appropriated text on video and blue pencil tracings on vellum
Video duration: 8:09 & 6 (9"x 12) drawings
This series of drawings and accompanying video comes out a closing of a theme park in El Salvador in late April of 2013. The theme park was called the Teleferico de San Jacinto (english translation of Teleferico is “aerial-tram”) As a person who was born in El Salvador and raised in the San Francisco East Bay most of my recent contact and knowledge of what's currently happening in El Salvador comes from engaging with social media sites and other forms of internet based media. When the closing of the theme park was announced on the Prensa Grafica’s (a newspaper in El Salvador) facebook page there was an outcry of commentaries that vary from anger, sadness, indifference, condescending rhetoric and politics, in short there was a clear opinionated polarization from people commenting on the closing of the theme park. People blamed, gangs, the liberal political party, the right wing party, the economy, people's indifference to saving the park and the list goes on.
Along with the announcement of the closing of the theme park the Prensa Grafica asked its facebook “fans” to share their family photographs of the theme park through the years. I downloaded those photographs shared by people with children in the images and traced those photos excluding a lot of detail present in the original photographs plus I took online commentaries verbatim from readers concerning the closure and put on a looping video that you see here.
To see accompanying video click HERE