Vergangenheitsbewältigung
By Gladys Garcia
Tucson, Arizona: Spaceheater Editions, 2016. Edition of 50.

7 x 7"; 48 pages. HP Indigo printed on acid-free Mohawk Superfine paper. Signed and numbered by the artist on the colophon. Includes an original, signed, archival inkjet print, in an antique silkworm-patterned glassine enclosure attached to back pastedown. Text block has blackened head, tail, and fore-edges. Bound in pictorial paper boards.

Spaceheater Editions: "Vergangenheitsbewältigung is the process of coming to terms with the past. Vergangenheit, 'past,' and bewältigung, 'overcoming the negative, repressed and incriminating mental injuries and guilt.' It is a German composite-word that is best rendered in English as a 'struggle to overcome the negatives of the past.'

"In 2016 Garcia found a box of old family photographs in an antique store. The photographs chronicled the life of a small German-American boy named Klaus Lechner, starting around 1890 and continuing until the 1940s or 1950s. It is unclear where he grew up, but the picture of the family homestead (shown on the colophon page) appears to be somewhere in the Midwest. Although there were family first names on the backs of the photographs, there wasn't much other information aside from the little boy's last name. Garcia thought about how this one family's precious genealogical visual record ended up in a Southwestern antique store, and how nobody in the future will remember them, their personalities, or any of their human foibles. Using a scanner, Garcia 'treated' the original photographs to appear as they were being viewed though the twists and mists of time. The text she wrote uses the thesis that people (or maybe more precisely family) are rarely acknowledged or remembered for positive things. And in the end, as greater and greater amounts of time pass, that it really doesn't matter, since all is forgotten.

"Gladys Estrellita Garcia was born and raised in Texas ... She has a BFA in Visual Communications and a BA in Spanish from Northern Arizona University."
$75