El Comercio, The Trade

Rose Salane combines text, photography, and found artifacts to examine personal histories amid historical events. In El Comercio, The Trade, Salane has overlaid the actions of the RAND Corporation, a 1950s American global-policy think tank; an Esso petrol company logo; and a fabricated newspaper article showing a photograph of her mother, grandmother, and aunt in Peru, all of whom would later immigrate to the United States. In the photograph, Salane's family is pictured on a grass median with an Esso gas station in the background. This picture was taken before the RAND corporation published its memorandum on the 1968 Peruvian military coup d’état, rooted in disputes over oil fields in northern Peru. Shown together, these artifacts—the report detailing the political transition and character of the new military government, the transnational corporate logo, and the reportage of Salane's mother's personal experience of the city of Lima just before the coup—stage...