Doris Salcedo talks about making the art of violence

An air of abandonment permeates the sculptures and installations of Doris Salcedo, who for nearly four decades has drawn her materials and her inspiration from the testimonies she collects from the victims of war and extrajudicial violence. Neither figurative nor totally abstract, these works have a metonymic effect: a broken chair, a wardrobe sunk into the concrete or a shoe sewn into a cow’s bladder evoke the bodies that have abandoned them. If Salcedo’s work is difficult, it is also of sublime beauty. Against all expectations, the grass insinuates itself between the planks of a wooden table. Water bubbles through the dense sand. With a career survey at the Fondation Beyeler Basel (until September 17) and a major new installation included in the just-concluded Sharjah Biennale, Salcedo discusses his incisive approach and how art can empower us hope in the face of an “endless catastrophe”.

I WAS BORN IN COLOMBIA, where you don’t have many 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 the Truth and Reconciliation Commission began. There are historical aspects that really determine who you are and the kind of life you live. Society has been so radically transformed – distorted – in my lifetime that I have no choice but to record 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 are really going through. What interests me is to understand how a person is forced to become a victim. This process usually begins with declaring a person socially dead. There is marginalization – economic, political, social – and once that social death is achieved, physical death occurs. Because so many aspects of this process are unknown, I found it absolutely essential for me to go out and tell the stories of the victims. To get their testimonials. I have to seek out the materiality of the environment in which they live. My work changes radically in materiality from one piece to another because I try to be faithful to the testimony given to me. In doing this, I recognize that life precedes art.

Violence is always a case of hyper-representation: it is a question of imprinting the act of force 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 have represent violence, so that violence continues to circulate in our environment. Jorge Luis Borges gave me a hint on how to gift 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 always want to be at this point before or after – but never during – an event. My whole job in this world is to restore some of the dignity that was taken away from the victims, and I believe that can only be done through beauty.

Victims always face a crisis. For the Greeks, the crisis was the cosmos. It was fate. There is nothing the individual can do to avoid his tragedy. All the victims I speak to in my work are faced with only two options: life or death. I need the work to present the absence of exit from this condition, the absence of the possibility of continuing a dignified life. This is why the work is always sealed. He is airless. It’s oppressive.

With the larger scale works that I have done, some are purely sculptural and some 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 do phallic sculpture. I also want people to look down. I wish we could turn our attention to those below us, in the lowest part of society. So with a few pieces, like Shibboleth [2007] at the Tate Modern Turbine Hall, I literally wanted people to roll their eyes. In 2019, I made what I call a counter-monument, borrowing the term coined by James Young. They gave me thirty-seven tons of weapons that belonged to the guerrillas in Colombia. I thought it would be impossible to monumentalize these weapons because weapons don’t deserve to be on a pedestal. I wanted to symbolically reverse the power that armed people wield over civilian populations, so I melted down the weapons with the help of a group of women victims of sexual slavery in Colombia, and we created the ground of a museum of contemporary art and memory here in Bogota.

Every time I start a song, I’m lost. I have no idea where I’m going. I always start from blank slate. I radically change studio. I don’t have the same tools. To make a piece that makes sense, I have to get as far away from the work as possible. Only the artist who can forget himself can connect with the traumatic aspect of his environment or his story. We always have to step into the unknown, where we are literally bewildered. This is where I have to start to find peace, but it’s a terrible and horrible place.

I love Walter Benjamin’s idea of ​​the Angel of History. He looks at the destruction, and suddenly a wind of progress carries the angel away. My case is the opposite: Nothing keeps me away. I must be there, contemplating the endless disaster that surrounds me. If I talk about sexual violence, for example, the event has already taken place, and I arrived late when I met the victim; but these events continue in their present and their future. It is not something that is forgotten.

The same can be said of a massacre in a school, a synagogue or a park, not only in Colombia but all over the world. The effects of the violence continue into the future. I tried to capture this in the materiality of my work. I thought the ugliness of Colombia’s civil war was unique to the Global South, but as globalization grows, Trump becomes possible. Brexit is possible, Viktor Orban is possible. You find the mark of tragedy everywhere you go. I see that the first world now has the same levels of inequality that we had in the so-called third world, and inequality necessarily creates violence. That’s why I think my work has become more relevant, even if my approach hasn’t changed.

Nevertheless, art is a means of affirming life. It’s a way of telling society that art and life take precedence over death. Art is hopeful, and I am hopeful. I believe that there are enough people who now think 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 feeds on pessimism. We need to produce images that show us how amazing the human spirit is, how beautiful the human spirit can be, and the level of dignity we all deserve. Even though my work may present lives that have been destroyed, I want to present the brightness, beauty and complexity of the universe that created that specific life.

– As said to Evan Moffit