Claudia Bernardi

Much of Claudia Bernardi's work is informed profoundly by the horrors she witnessed firsthand while working as a forensic anthropologist searching for the desaparecidos, or "disappeared ones," in Central America. She equates the process of creating her prints with that of the process of exhumation, experiences that she feels are both cathartic and purgative. As she states, creating art is "the alchemical process of transforming painful memories of anonymous human remains into the poetry of resistance and the persistence of hope." The dead are both recognized and honored in the hauntingly beautiful print Descubrí en mi costilla izquierda, un pulgar. A ghostly, skeletal shape emerges from a vivid yellow field, while a handprint, marked with a dash of red pigment suggestive of blood, appears to push against the print's surface. Although this work is a direct response to the tragedy of lives cut short, its subtle, dreamlike quality whispers not of suffering, but of hope. Ms. Bernardi, who fled Argentina in 1980, worked as a forensic anthropologist on the Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team. In 1992, led by her sister Patricia, the team excavated the mass grave at the site of El Mozote in El Salvador, where nearly 300 people, including 131 children, were murdered. About Segura Publishing Co.

Descubrí en mi costilla izquierda, un pulgar/ In My Left Rib I Found a Thumb 1997|Collograph fresco|12"x12"| Edition of 40 $550 ©2000 Segura Publishing Co. and Claudia Bernardi