Doris Salcedo, Uprooted, 2020–22, 804 dead trees and steel, 98 1/2 x 21 2/3 x 16 1/2′. Installation view, Sharjah Biennial 15, Kalba Ice Factory, Sharjah Art Foundation, 2023. Photo: Juan Castro.
An air of abandonment pervades the sculptures and installations of Doris Salcedo, who for nearly four decades has sourced her materials and inspiration from testimony she gathers from victims of war and extrajudicial violence. Neither representational nor wholly abstract, these works have a metonymic effect: a broken chair, a wardrobe sunk in concrete, or a shoe sewn up in a cow’s bladder invoke the bodies who left them behind. While Salcedo’s work may be difficult, it is also sublimely beautiful. Against all odds, grass pries between the boards of a wooden table. Water bubbles up through densely packed sand. With a career survey on at Basel’s Beyeler Foundation (through September 17) and a major new installation included in the just-closed Sharjah Biennial, Salcedo discusses her incisive approach and how art can give us hope in the face of “endless catastrophe.”
I WAS BORN IN COLOMBIA, where you don’t have a lot of options. You don’t have an artistic tradition from which you can choose this or that; our traditions were destroyed during colonization. We are not part of the Western world, and we have to operate with the imposition of civil war. I was born in 1958, the same year that the Truth and Reconciliation Commission started. There are historical aspects that really determine who you are and the kind of life you live. Society has been so drastically transformed—deformed—during my lifetime that I have no option but to register these traumatic events. I don’t have the artistic freedom to choose my subjects.
There are aspects of violence that we cannot know. We don’t know what people really go through. I am interested in understanding how a person is forced into the condition of a victim. That process usually begins by declaring a person socially dead. There is marginalization—economic, political, social—and once that social death is achieved, physical death comes about. Because so many aspects of that process that are unknown, I found that it was absolutely essential for me to go and tell victims’ stories. To obtain their testimonies. I have to go and find the materiality of the environment in which they live. My work changes its materiality radically from one piece to another due to the fact that I’m trying to be faithful to the testimony that has been given to me. By doing this, I acknowledge that life precedes art.
Violence is always a case of hyper-representation: It’s about imprinting the forceful act on a victim. There are always physical traces of violence. I didn’t want to do what Hollywood does or what authoritarian regimes do; they always represent violence, so that violence continues circulating in our environment. Jorge Luis Borges gave me a clue on how to present violence without ever representing the violent act itself. He said, “The aesthetic act is the imminence of an event that does not take place.” I want to be always at that point before or after—but never during—an event. My whole task in this world is to give back some of the dignity that was taken away from the victims, and I believe that can only be done through beauty.
Doris Salcedo, Atrabiliarios (detail), 1996, drywall, shoes, cow bladder, surgical thread.
Victims are always faced with a crisis. For the Greeks, crisis was the cosmos. It was destiny. There is nothing the individual could do to avoid their tragedy. All of the victims whom I address in my work are faced with only two options: life or death. I need the work to present the lack of an exit from this condition, the lack of possibility of continuing a dignified life. That’s why the work is always sealed. It is airless. It is oppressive.
With the larger-scale works I have made, some are purely sculptural and others are an attempt to destroy the whole idea of monumentality. Monumentality is always hierarchical. It’s always vertical. As a woman, I don’t want to make a phallic sculpture. I also want people to look down. I wish we could turn our attention toward the ones who are below us, in the lowest part of society. So, with some pieces, like Shibboleth [2007] at the Tate Modern Turbine Hall, I literally wanted people to look down. In 2019, I made what I call a counter-monument, borrowing the term conceived by James Young. I was given thirty-seven tons of weapons that belonged to the guerillas in Colombia. I thought it would be impossible to monumentalize these weapons because arms do not deserve to be on a pedestal. I wanted to symbolically reverse the power that armed people exert on civilian populations, so I melted the arms with the help of a group of women who were victims of sexual slavery in Colombia, and we created the floor for a museum of contemporary art and memory here in Bogotá.
Doris Salcedo, Palimpsest, 2013–17, hydraulic equipment, ground marble, resin, corundum, sand and water, dimensions variable. Installation view, Fondation Beyeler, Basel, 2022. Photo: Mark Niedermann.
Every time I begin a piece, I’m lost. I have no clue where I’m going. I always start from a tabula rasa. I change my studio radically. I don’t have the same tools. In order to make a piece that’s meaningful, I have to remove myself from the work as much as possible. Only the artist who can forget about themselves can connect with the traumatic aspect of their environment or history. We need to always enter into the terrain of the unknown, where we are literally disoriented. That’s where I need to begin in order to find peace, but it is a frightful, horrible place to be.
I love Walter Benjamin’s idea of the Angel of History. He stares at destruction, and suddenly a wind of progress takes the angel away. My case is the opposite: Nothing takes me away. I have to be there, contemplating the endless catastrophe around me. If I’m talking about sexual violence, for example, the event already took place, and I arrived late when I encountered the victim; but those events continue in their present and their future. It’s not something that can be forgotten.
Doris Salcedo, A Flor de Piel II (detail), 2013–14, rose petals and thread, dimensions variable.
The same can be said about a massacre in a school, a synagogue, or a park, not only in Columbia but in any place in the world. The effects of violence continue into the future. I have tried to capture that in the materiality of my work. I thought that the ugliness of the Civil War in Colombia was peculiar to the Global South, but as globalization develops, Trump becomes possible. Brexit is possible, Viktor Orban is possible. You find the mark of tragedy wherever you go. I see the first world now having the same levels of inequality that we used to have in the so-called third world, and inequality necessarily creates violence. That’s why I think my work has become more pertinent, even though my approach has not changed.
Nonetheless, art is a way to affirm life. It’s a way of telling the society that art and life prevail over death. Art is hopeful, and I am hopeful. I believe there are enough people now thinking that we have to save this planet, that we have to overcome racism and inequality. We cannot all give in to pessimism. The far right nourishes itself with pessimism. We have to produce images that show us how extraordinary the human mind is, how beautiful the human spirit can be, and the level of dignity that we all deserve. Even though my work might present lives that have been destroyed, I want to present the brightness, beauty, and complexity of the universe that created that specific life.
— As told to Evan Moffitt
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