Doris Salcedo

The work of Doris Salcedo has been compared to a mental archaeology of sorts. She appropriates materials, often domestic materials, which have been charged with meaning through everyday use, and she uses them in her work as a way of illustrating the burden of social and political conflict in a very tangible, local scale. It makes these larger conflicts feel real and close. Her work embodies the lives of the marginalized, addressing the notion of memories and the politics of forgetting these lives. There’s a real sense of loss and mortality in her work: in Colombia people sometimes just disappear, without a trace. No charges made, no body found. Her work explicitly deals with the void left by disappearance.

Her work, although it’s developed out of individual, personal components, also seems to have the power of community behind it: it acts as a kind of rallying cry almost. There’s a real sense of healing to the work too, so it deals not only with the violent act, but the healing that has to come for survivors. Her work Atrabiliarios illustrates this well, I think. She sees her work as a sort of perpetual witness, a kind of social conscience. Her work is not literal; it’s very subtle and fragile, but still very powerful.

Salcedo: “Colombia is a country full of widows. There was one widow, the widow of a political leader, who told me how difficult it was to continue living with objects that are reminders of her husband. Every morning you open the closet and the clothing is there. Every day you sit at the dining table and the empty chair is there, screaming the absence of that person. It can become a very difficult object to live with.”

1550 Chairs Stacked Between Two City Buildings / 2003 / Istanbul Biennial

My first design proposal for the courtyard attempts to reference Salcedo’s method and larger objective. It appropriates the image of the school chair, similar to how Salcedo uses the figure of the chair in “1550 Chairs,” in an attempt to depict history and recall past collective experiences. It is a subtle reference, but it gains strength through aggregation; the amassing of them in large quantity provides visual power. The image of the chair communicates both the physical absence of the past occupant as well as the open space for the future occupant. The aggregate form communicates both the individual and collective experience. Physically, the line drawing pattern would manifest as permanent floor paint on the ground.