Silently disturbing: the political aesthetics of Doris Salcedo’s recent installations

Duration is essentially memory, conscience and liberty. It is conscience and liberty because it is, primordially, memory.

Gilles Deleuze¹

As the very first representative of a non-European tradition to be commissioned by the Tate Modern Unilever Series, Doris Salcedo has chosen an understated technique: that of inscribing into the ground of the Turbine Hall. The scar that begins like a thin, almost invisible line, at the main entrance gradually becomes a chasm in the earth at the far end of the former power station. This earthquake-like insertion evokes the brokenness and separateness of the post-colonial cultures of a non-white, non-European legacy. The installation is a metonymy for the term absence – an absence that negates the space of post-colonial peoples. The construction of a 'negative space'², or emptied out space, corresponds to the trajectory of the history of post-colonialism.³ It is in Shibboleth (2007), where space is occupied silently and discreetly, not via a sense of domination or empowerment, that this trajectory can be traced.

An 'imaginative landscape' is at work in the heart of what Salcedo states is a monument to a European and modernist tradition of Western art; the Tate Modern.4 Shibboleth disrupts the Western view of landscape that creates a sense of things being in place and emphasises 'a visual scape in which the observer stands back and distances himself or herself from the thing observed.'5 In reversing the role of the viewer as not only witness but accomplice in an act of silence, Shibboleth proposes a different take on the role of Western art practice and traditions of art: here the earth opens up under the viewers' feet, evoking an earthquake, an eruption of space, time and place. The view is negated by its downward spiralling motion, bringing to mind a story in Borges' Labyrinths; negativity has become one with the ground, forcing a glance into an abyss that is disquieting in its silence. The construction of a 'negative space' has become the main focus of Salcedo's recent installations, finding its most disturbing peak in Shibboleth. The laborious and time-consuming activity of inscribing into the ground is synonymous with a laborious execution of an investment in loss and absence. Expressing the influence of works by the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, Salcedo speaks of the 'gratuitous and uncompensated work of loss.'6 This idea of a 'negative labour'7 is not simply an exercise in reproducing essentially nothingness or loss, manifesting itself in Salcedo's installation pieces as inverted and absolutely emptied out space. It is also the politics of a quiet yet disturbing strategy that Salcedo has created over the course of the past fifteen years.

For Salcedo this strategy has been as much a pre-occupation with loss as it has been a process of memory. Following the political trajectory of civil war and disappearings that have marked her native Colombia ⁸, memory has become a working material itself.⁹ Citing Levinas, Salcedo speaks of 'the urgency' and at the same time 'the delay' in re-constructing memories. For Salcedo, the political trajectory of Colombia is not dissimilar to the fate of many Latin American countries between the 1960s and 1980s.

The anthropologist Michael Taussig, whose work is extensively linked to Colombia and the understanding of its society, writes about public secrecy and the unbearable task of having to remain silent in front of a public secret. The 'labour of the negative'¹⁰, as he describes it, implies all that is generally known but cannot be acknowledged. It is such a solidly matter of fact truth that the mere thought of revealing it can only bring more misfortune. It is linked with temporality, because as he says, it is in its swiftness and transgression that reality suddenly acquires a state of invisible presence. And so the most important social knowledge becomes the act of 'knowing what not to know', or how to remain silent in front of a public secret. Remaining as an invisible presence, this public secret must find other ways of manifesting itself: via an 'unmasking' or during a 'ritualized exposure'.¹¹ This unmasking can also occur via the experience of works of art.

Salcedo's installations follow in this line of the understanding of history as a moment of loss where the singular history of one person suddenly becomes the collective memory of a whole nation. Many of her earlier works, such as the Atrabilarios (1992-1996) and Casa Viuda (1992-1995) series,¹² forged a claustrophobic and enclosed environment. While staying true to the preoccupations in her earlier works, what can now be seen emerging is an aesthetic inversion of space. The exceptional factor in this inversion is the temporal aspect of these later installations: no longer confined to being singular pieces, destined to be experienced solely in a museum or gallery environment, Salcedo's site-specific installations create a space that questions or opens up the experience of the present moment. The cemented-in closets from Untitled Furniture (1989-ongoing) and obliquely positioned doors in Casa Viuda, give way to a vacuumed out or negative space. Whereas with the individual museum pieces the occurrence of memory appeared via an almost obsessive blockage to the point of amnesia,¹³ now it is the absent or negative space that gives rise to the emergence of the physical memory of violence. The performative nature of the site-specific installations relies on the inscriptive quality of the open space that becomes the commemorative space of 'an act of memory'.¹⁴

What is crucial here is the introduction of a term that the Brazilian psychoanalyst (and curator) Suely Rolnik has loosely identified as the state of 'invisible memory';¹⁵ a state experienced by many Brazilian artists whose creative force was stifled by the military dictatorship in Brazil (1964-1985). This 'invisible memory' is what remains when silence has become the only commemorative tool, as the process of reactivating the actual memory of violence in order to recover it could perhaps be too painful. It is not so much via a process of amnesia, but rather via a performative ritual that the memory can be reclaimed without opening the wound to full exposure. It is through this act of 'invisible memory' that the void or emptied out space confronts the viewer in all its monumentality. In relation to this public spaces, such as government buildings, where acts of mass violence have occurred, become places of 'invisible memory.'

Yet, the experience of the present event on the façade of that same building, via a performative translation of commemoration, transformed the use of the space and not the memory itself. The unfolding of the installation in time creates a temporal paradox that interweaves both the past and present together. Salcedo herself commented with respect to Noviembre 6 y 7 that the inhabitants of Bogotá walking past the installation were actual bearers of the memory of the original event. The memory thus becomes transposed via the temporal experience of the past unfolding into the present, underlined by the anonymity of the chairs.17 The politically charged temporality of the event of commemoration was again evident in Salcedo's Installation for the 8th Istanbul Biennale (2003). In the empty space between two buildings in central Istanbul, Salcedo piled up 1,550 wooden chairs to commemorate anonymous victims, evoking the interweaving of personal stories in something akin to a collective mass grave. This unearthing of the memory transforms the space but not the memory, creating the same paradoxical tensions between order, chaos and temporality. This image of chaos constructed via the use of wooden chairs is synonymous with Salcedo's preoccupation with a paradoxical present tense that simultaneously enfolds 'urgency' and 'delay'; 'there is vertigo in violence: if one violent element wipes out another, and so on, time gathers momentum and complete chaos ensues. The only way of attempting to check this speed, this chaos, is through the process of the artwork.' 18 Thus in Salcedo's site-specific installation Noviembre 6 y 7 (Bogotá, Colombia, 2002) wooden chairs were slowly lowered over the façade of the building of the Palace of Justice to commemorate the political massacre of 1985.16 The temporal duration of the performance was crucial: at 11:35 am (the time when the first victim of the original siege was assassinated) the first chair was lowered, and at different speeds and intervals, another 280 chairs followed over the 53 hours of the performance, equaling the duration of the siege. Staging such a politically charged act in the original place of the event risked opening up the wound of the original memory.

It is this political tool of subversion that is quietly at work in another of Salcedo's installations. Site-specific, yet this time confined within the four walls of the gallery space, Neither (Whitecube, London, 2004) opens up the negative space to the viewer's experience. The subjugation and translation here once more relies on the temporal experience of the installation. The heterodoxically placed wire fence appears to be embedded in the gallery walls. In fact, it is a mere illusion intended to disrupt the viewers' sense of comfort and security. At the entrance of the gallery the wire mesh has been left purposely hanging outside the plasterboard, discreetly revealing its construction.

In this installation solid materials, such as Salcedo's previously favored cement and wood, give place to an almost invisible steel fence. Yet, the seemingly secure environment of the four walls of the gallery feels strangely controlled once the viewer realises that they are actually part of the void. Engulfed in the clinically white walls of the gallery, and fenced in by the vertical and horizontal lines of the embedded wire, the time spent in the space suddenly becomes an attempt to play with human freedom. A perpetual suspension of time is at work here, where the viewers' time becomes a metaphoric experience of time spent in incarceration.

In all its grandeur Neither negates the space. There are no clues as to what has happened, no immediate references to a historical event. Yet the history of the wire itself reveals an unprecedented need in our times for security and the control of borders where no-one can claim sovereignty. Neither testifies to an in-between state of place, where insecurity and precariousness reign.

The relationship of the monumental and the epic to the quiet and quietly disturbing can be summarized in Salcedo's own words when she speaks of the experience of a tragic hero as opposed to the vastness of solitude.¹⁹ It seems that in the architecture of the void the uninterrupted work of loss constitutes a different kind of memory: that of the experience of all anonymous victims or illegal immigrants who, on the margins of society, almost always forgotten, quietly attest to another form of post-modern hero. These anonymous figures have no specific pedestal nor are they commemorated for their acts of bravery. They suffer in silence and it is this sense of silence, or the 'labour of the negative', that Salcedo's installations stand for.

Thanks to Tate.

Further Information:
More information on Doris Salcedo
More information on Stella Baraklianou
External information on Doris Salcedo whitecube.com/artists/salcedo
External information on Doris Salcedo tate.org.uk/modern/exhibitions/dorissalcedo

Notes:

1. Gilles Deleuze quoted by Salcedo in interview with Charles Merewether in: Princethal, N., Basualdo, C., Huyssen, A., (2000), Doris Salcedo. Phaidon Press, London. This quote is directly linked to Salcedo's idea of silence as crucial to the viewers' experience of her works: 'The silent contemplation of each viewer permits the life seen in the work to reappear… In art, silence is already a language – a language prior to language – of the unexpressed and the inexpressible,' Doris Salcedo in interview with Charles Merewether.

2. Mieke Bal also refers to this space in her use of the term 'holding environment'. See Bal, M., 'Earth ache: the aesthetics of the cut', in Borchardt, A., ed. (2007), Doris Salcedo: Shibboleth. Tate publishing, London.

3. Post-colonialism as a critical/cultural theory has been most directly associated with the works of Edward Said and Franz Fanon. Post-colonial people are usually identified as the people belonging to a non-white, non-European tradition and of having been subjugated to violent domination mainly under the wave of European colonialism that occurred up until the early nineteenth century.

4. Borchardt, A., ed. (2007), Doris Salcedo

5. From 'Proposal for unrealised project: Marsum Churchyard in Groningen, The Netherlands, March 2002' in Salcedo, D., (2004), Neither. Jay Joping/Whitecube, London

6. As quoted by D. Salcedo in her proposal for the Turbine Hall installation. Borchardt, A., ed. (2007), Doris Salcedo.

7. See following section of the main essay.

8. There is evidence to suggest that in 2001 alone more than 4,000 people were victims of political killings and some 300,000 were displaced. See: Taussig, M., (2003), Law in a Lawless Land: Diary of a Limpieza in Colombia. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago & London.

9. 'My work speaks of the continuation of life, a life disfigured, as Derrida would say. Memory must work between the figure of the one who has died and the life disfigured by the death. As a result, I would say that the only way in which I confront memory in my work is to begin with the failure of memory.' Doris Salcedo interviewed by Charles Merewether, in: Princethal, N., Basualdo, C., Huyssen, A., (2000) Doris Salcedo.

10. Taussig, M., (1999), Defacement: Public Secrecy and the Labor of the Negative. Stanford University Press, California. Following a line of thought that stems from Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, Taussig extends the 'labour of the negative' to his idea of how secrecy or a state of invisible presence magnifies itself or reality, such that secrecy becomes a commonly acknowledged secret, therefore, a public secret.

11. Ibid.

12. Atrabilarios (1992-1996) was comprised of objects often from missing people placed in the niches of walls behind a semi-transparent screen made of animal fibres and hermetically sealed with surgical threads. La Casa Viuda (1992-1995) was a series of installation pieces made out of various domestic materials, metal, fabric, and bones.

13. Andreas Huyssen writing on the Casa Viuda series speaks of amnesia or the collective traumatic amnesia inherent in cases where people have experienced states of violence due to dictatorships or years of military oppression. See: Huyssen, A., 'Sculpture, materiality and memory in the age of amnesia', in Bradley, J. and Huyssen, A., (1998), Displacements. Miroslaw Balka, Doris Salcedo, Rachel Whiteread. Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto.

14. As quoted by Salcedo in her proposal for the Noviembre 6 y 7. Borchardt, A., ed. (2007), Doris Salcedo.

15. For an extensive take on this see: Bang Larsen, L. and Rolnik, S., (2007), 'A conversation on Lygia Clark's Structuring the self', in Afterall Magazine, Issue 16, Autumn/Winter.

16. The occasion was the commemoration of the anniversary of the events of 6 and 7 November 1985 when the Supreme Court in Bogotá was seized by Leftist rebels of the M-19 and stormed by the army, leaving over 100 fatalities.

17. See: Mengham, R., 'Failing better: Salcedo's trajectory' in: Salcedo, D., (2004), Neither.

18. Salcedo interviewed by Carlos Basualdo, in Princethal N., Basualdo C., Huyssen A., (2000), Doris Salcedo.

19. As mentioned at the Tate Modern press conference for Shibboleth, (2007), October, London. See also Salcedo in interview with Charles Merewether in: Princethal N., Basualdo C., Huyssen A., (2000), Doris Salcedo.

Stella Baraklianou, 2008