by Doris Salcedo Palimpsest (2013-17), now one of his most famous works, has been exhibited at the Fondation Beyeler since last October. It is a huge ground installation in which the names are written in the sand on stone slabs. Periodically, other names, written in the water, appear and overlap them, before receding almost as quickly as they appeared. The names are those of the people who lost their lives at sea: refugees, asylum seekers; the most vulnerable people in society, who were looking for safety.
In May, Palimpsest was joined by seven other installations of the Colombian artist’s work in a major survey, reflecting her constant and unwavering focus on global humanitarian issues – political violence, human rights, the legacies of colonialism, the imbalances of the north and south.
Although she often alludes to geopolitics and the recent history of her native country, Salcedo’s work, she points out, reflects the effects of an “interconnected” world. This aspect is highlighted in his most recent work, not in Basel, but in the recently closed room Sharjah Biennial: Uprooted (2023), which uses dead trees to build an eerie dwelling that alludes to both migration and the climate emergency associated with it. “We are all in this together,” she says The arts journal. “It’s a pretty small planet. And everything that happens in one place is linked to another place.
The Art Newspaper: When you opened the Beyeler exhibit, news emerged of asylum seekers in Greece being forced onto a boat and back to sea. Seeing Palimpsest installed across the world must be rewarding, but is there also pain in its eternal relevance?
Doris Salcedo: Somehow, I’m used to it. Maybe because I come from a country like Colombia, where we are not used to seeing progress and development as such, but we are still immersed in this eternal crisis that tangles us every day . I’m used to the fact that what art does is most often in vain, I would say. I don’t believe we have the chance to save lives or to massively shift consciousness. I just hope that maybe an individual could understand something and that understanding could be shared with someone else. This is not an advertisement, we are not the mainstream press, we are incapable of raising awareness in this way. It is therefore extremely painful. But I know that’s the nature of art. And it is precisely there that lies its poetic strength. It is not on the side of power, certainly. It is a softer, subtle, poetic task.
by Salcedo Palimpsestexhibited at the Fondation Beyeler, with its names of people lost at sea, is a haunting reminder of the global migration crisis
© The artist; photo by Mark Niederman
The voltage in Palimpsest lies in the contrast between this softness and the brutality of the subject.
It’s like witnessing the disappearance of a life that repeats itself again and again before your eyes. So when the name which obviously signals full life is there, because of the water, it shines with clarity. And once the name starts to fade, it’s like drowning all over again. The grief experienced by the family is reproduced and replayed continually, as is the case for families who may be waiting, without even knowing what the fate of the person has been, this absence being the strongest presence in their everyday life. .
Uprooted, in Sharjah, again deals with this subject of migration.
I started out thinking that I wanted to merge these two topics that I think are the most important topics of our time: migration and, of course, the climate crisis. And I wanted to put that together, and the impossibility for a migrant to one day own a space on this earth. This is why they are forced to die, either in the desert or in the sea. Because they are forced into these liminal spaces where it is impossible to live. The countries that create the greatest number of migrants are also the countries most affected by the climate crisis, and are also the same countries that have been brutalized by imperialism and colonialism.
On top of that, these are the countries that now receive all the toxic waste that the Global North exports. It’s just unbearable, the condition we’re forced into. So I wanted to address all these issues in this work. But once the play was over, I realized that I wasn’t just talking about the condition of the migrant or the global south, but I was talking about the condition of all of us. We are all losing our common home. Thus, the meaning of the work expanded for me.
Should there be a correlation between the difficulty of doing the work and the difficulty of approaching the subject?
I always say that the works I do are almost impossible to do. I push myself to the limit. And when you see it finished, you don’t really understand how it could be done. This impossibility goes hand in hand with the impossibility of the conditions, the extreme hardships that the victims, the refugees and now all of us face. It is therefore intimately linked.
I sometimes think of absurd gestures. If there is a huge waste of life, in political violence, I must perform an absolutely absurd gesture, which shows this waste of energy, this waste of life. So I do things that go against the logic of our society’s means of production: I embroider in wood, which is absurd [in the series Unland (1995-98)]; or I make a huge shroud of rose petals, which is completely absurd [in A Flor de Piel (2012)]. This absurdity therefore shows the extreme difficulty and the extreme experiences that I carefully seek out and try to address.
Salcedo assembly of a wardrobe, concrete and clothes, Untitled (1998), is a response to loss and trauma
©Doris Salcedo; photo by David Heald
You mentioned how emotion is foreign to a large part of Western contemporary art. And yet you use some of these languages - minimalism, found object, etc. – to communicate a maximum of emotion.
Yes, it’s like feelings and emotions are dirty words in art. Everything is supposed to be neutral and dry. I think it’s the fact that I come from the global south. And now I tell stories full of emotion, stories that are based on real events, stories that have not been told and there is a huge need to tell them.
When I was young, I grew up being told that I belonged to an underdeveloped society; my mind was underdeveloped, our art was underdeveloped, our economy, our industry. Can you imagine how brutal it is for a person to grow up knowing full well that you are underdeveloped? Gradually, I began to think that was not the case. We all have the same abilities and abilities.
Just tell the story backwards. We are therefore certainly inserted into the canon of Western art, because all other art has been completely destroyed by European imperialism. But we have to overturn that canon to tell our stories. And in this upheaval, the emotion must pass because the amount of pain that society has had to endure is enormous. It must therefore be presented, shown. And there is no other way but with feelings.
One way to do this, of course, is through metaphor. And again, there is a direct correlation between material and metaphor. Do these metaphors arise as an epiphany or through hard-earned work with studio materials?
It’s both. Because I work very hard doing research, interviews, drawings and sketches, literally for years. And then all of a sudden, there is the epiphany. And then the job is done. In most cases, the job is completed in one go. When it appears in a drawing, the materiality is there… I dare not say that I think about it, it just appears, as I have been told. And then he appears. Of course, I have to do material testing. But it’s clearly going to be tears or water, or it’s clearly going to be concrete or dead trees. It appears like this in a sketch, complete as an almost finished piece. And then, of course, the struggle to refine materiality. But it’s both.
• Doris Salcedo, Fondation Beyeler, Basel, until September 17; Sharjah Biennial 15: Thinking Historically in the Present, closed on June 11
• Listen to our interview with Doris Salcedo on the A brush with… podcast
