Doris Salcedo

Doris Salcedo (born 1958) is a Colombian visual artist and sculptor. Her work is influenced by her experiences of life in Colombia and is generally composed of commonplace items such as wooden furniture, clothing, concrete, grass, and rose petals. Salcedo's work gives form to pain, trauma, and loss, while creating space for individual and collective mourning. These themes stem from her own personal history. Members of her own family were among the many people who have disappeared in politically troubled Colombia. Much of her work deals with the fact that, while the death of a loved one can be mourned, their disappearance leaves an unbearable emptiness. Salcedo lives and works in Bogotá, Colombia.

Doris Salcedo was born in 1958 in Bogotá, Colombia. She completed a Bachelor of Fine Arts at Jorge Tadeo Lozano University in 1980, before traveling to New York City, where she completed a Master of Fine Arts degree at New York University in 1984. She then returned to Bogotá to teach at the Universidad Nacional de Colombia. She is married to Colombian novelist and sociologist Azriel Bibliowicz, whose work investigates the Jewish experience in Colombia. The couple lives and works in Bogotá.

Salcedo addresses the question of forgetting and memory in her installation artwork. In pieces such as Unland: The Orphan's Tunic from 1997 and the La Casa Viuda series from the early 1990s, Salcedo takes ordinary household items, such as a chair and table, and transforms them into memorials for victims of the Civil War in Colombia.

In his book Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory, Andreas Huyssen dedicates a chapter to Salcedo and Unland: The Orphan's Tunic, presenting her work as “Memory Sculpture.” Huyssen offers a detailed description of the piece, a seemingly mundane table that, when considered closely, “captures the viewer's imagination in its unexpected, haunting visual and material presence.” A seemingly everyday piece of furniture is in fact made of two destroyed tables joined and covered with a whitish veil of fabric, presumably the orphan's original tunic. Upon even closer inspection, hundreds of small human hairs appear to be the thread that is attaching the tunic to the table. Huyssen equates the structure of the tables to the body. “If the tunic is like a skin...then the table gains a metaphoric presence as body, not now of an individual orphan but an orphaned community.” Salcedo's Unland is a memory sculpture, presenting the past of her own country, Colombia to the international art audience.

During a conversation with Carlos Basualdo, Salcedo discusses her own approach to producing art:

“The way that an artwork brings materials together is incredibly powerful. Sculpture is its materiality. I work with materials that are already charged with significance, with meaning they have required in the practice of everyday life...Then, I work to the point where it becomes something else, where metamorphosis is reached.”

Again, in a 1998 interview with Charles Merewether, Salcedo expounds on this notion of metamorphosis, describing the viewer's experience with her own artistic repair or restoration of the past.

“The silent contemplation of each viewer permits the life seen in the work to reappear. Change takes place as if the victim's experience were reaching out...The sculpture presents the experience as something present- a reality that resounds within the silence of each human being that gazes upon it.”