Artist:
Doris Salcedo
Title:
The Deputies of the Assembly of Valle del Cauca
Year:
2007
Adress:
Plaza de Bolivar
Website:
www.wikipedia.org:
The Valle del Cauca Deputies hostage crisis (Spanish: Secuestro de los diputados del Valle del Cauca) refers to the kidnapping of 12 Deputies of the Valle del Cauca Department, Colombia, on April 12, 2002 by members of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) to pressure a prisoner exchange between them and the government and to negotiate the demilitarization of the municipalities of Florida and Pradera to initiate peace dialogues.
www.instituteforpublicart.org:
Plaza de Bolàvar, the main square of Bogotá, Colombia, is home to Colombia's Palace of Justice, National Capitol, Bogotá's Mayor's building and the Primary Cathedral of Bogotá. For nearly 200 years it has been the political and historical heart of Colombia. Tourists now flock here to take pictures of the Simón Bolàvar statue and the picturesque Monserrate Mountain overlooking the city.
One evening in July 2007, Plaza de Bolàvar was transformed by artist Doris Salcedo. For The Deputies of th Valle del Cauca (Los Diputados de la Asamblea del Valle del Cauca), she filled the plaza with candles honoring 11 Colombian government representatives killed by the FARC (Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia, or Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia). The legislators had been taken hostage in Cali, the third largest city in Colombia and capital of the department Valle del Cauca, and held for five years before they lost their lives.
The FARC used political kidnappings in an effort to pressure the Colombian government: they would release kidnapees in exchange for imprisoned guerrillas. Until this point the government had been opposed to this tactic. After holding the representatives in the jungle, the guerrillas thought they were being attacked by army forces; the FARC reacted by killing 11 of the 12 representatives they had sequestered five years prior.
Upon hearing this news, Doris Salcedo took to the center of Bogotá accompanied volunteers and quietly lit candles one by one until 25,000 of hem covered Plaza de Bolàvar. 'Memory is the essence of my work,' Doris says. 'If we don't know our past, there is no way we can live the present properly and there no way we can face the future.' This piece was an act of mourning that created a space where people could remember the deceased representatives.
Doris uses her experience as an 'other from the '˜wrong' place' to express her interpretation of political events in Colombia through her work. She is critical of her role as an artist: 'I don't think art can solve problems. I'm not doing anything for these families; I'm not doing anything for these victims. That's a reality we have to face when we talk about this type of art that's trying to address political issues. Art does not have the ability to redeem.'
The act of filling Plaza de Bolàvar with candles silently honored Colombia, a country that constantly mourns''oftentimes grieving death without bodies. 'If you want to dignify a human life then you have to comet's where we find dignity and almost turn [it] into a sacred space.' Plaza de Bolàvar is flanked on three sides by historic government buildings rising high above the square where politicians make high level decisions. The candles, small and quiet, reminded them of the work they have failed to do.
Source: Shanghai Academy of Fine Arts.
www.mcachicago.org:
Carlos Granada: 'The Act of Mourning consisted of first placing these candles in a very specific way, a reticular way, and then having people join us, having this installation that lasted six hours . . . is something that for us was very important because in Colombia''because of our political situation and our violence situation''we have become dehumanized and for me, what Doris was trying to do by this Act of Mourning was teach us how to mourn.'
Interview with MCA Chicago.
www.wikipedia.org:
Doris Salcedo (born 1958) is a Colombian-born visual artist and sculptor. Her work is influenced by her experiences of life in 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.
www.wikipedia.org:
Doris 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: Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and Politics of Memory, Andreas Huyssen dedicates a chapter to Doris 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 together 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 of Colombia to the international art audience.
During a conversation do, 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 upon this notion of the metamorphosis, describing the experience of the viewer 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 experience of the victim 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.'
Salcedo employs objects from the past, objects imbued with an important sense of history and, throughmporary memory sculptures, illustrates the flow of time. She joins the past and the present, repairs what she sees as incomplete and, in the eyes of Huyssen, presents 'memory at the edge of an abyss' ... memory in the literal sense' ... and memory as proces.
The Valle del Cauca Deputies hostage crisis (Spanish: Secuestro de los diputados del Valle del Cauca) refers to the kidnapping of 12 Deputies of the Valle del Cauca Department, Colombia, on April 12, 2002 by members of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) to pressure a prisoner exchange between them and the government and to negotiate the demilitarization of the municipalities of Florida and Pradera to initiate peace dialogues.
www.instituteforpublicart.org:
Plaza de Bolàvar, the main square of Bogotá, Colombia, is home to Colombia's Palace of Justice, National Capitol, Bogotá's Mayor's building and the Primary Cathedral of Bogotá. For nearly 200 years it has been the political and historical heart of Colombia. Tourists now flock here to take pictures of the Simón Bolàvar statue and the picturesque Monserrate Mountain overlooking the city.
One evening in July 2007, Plaza de Bolàvar was transformed by artist Doris Salcedo. For The Deputies of th Valle del Cauca (Los Diputados de la Asamblea del Valle del Cauca), she filled the plaza with candles honoring 11 Colombian government representatives killed by the FARC (Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia, or Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia). The legislators had been taken hostage in Cali, the third largest city in Colombia and capital of the department Valle del Cauca, and held for five years before they lost their lives.
The FARC used political kidnappings in an effort to pressure the Colombian government: they would release kidnapees in exchange for imprisoned guerrillas. Until this point the government had been opposed to this tactic. After holding the representatives in the jungle, the guerrillas thought they were being attacked by army forces; the FARC reacted by killing 11 of the 12 representatives they had sequestered five years prior.
Upon hearing this news, Doris Salcedo took to the center of Bogotá accompanied volunteers and quietly lit candles one by one until 25,000 of hem covered Plaza de Bolàvar. 'Memory is the essence of my work,' Doris says. 'If we don't know our past, there is no way we can live the present properly and there no way we can face the future.' This piece was an act of mourning that created a space where people could remember the deceased representatives.
Doris uses her experience as an 'other from the '˜wrong' place' to express her interpretation of political events in Colombia through her work. She is critical of her role as an artist: 'I don't think art can solve problems. I'm not doing anything for these families; I'm not doing anything for these victims. That's a reality we have to face when we talk about this type of art that's trying to address political issues. Art does not have the ability to redeem.'
The act of filling Plaza de Bolàvar with candles silently honored Colombia, a country that constantly mourns''oftentimes grieving death without bodies. 'If you want to dignify a human life then you have to comet's where we find dignity and almost turn [it] into a sacred space.' Plaza de Bolàvar is flanked on three sides by historic government buildings rising high above the square where politicians make high level decisions. The candles, small and quiet, reminded them of the work they have failed to do.
Source: Shanghai Academy of Fine Arts.
www.mcachicago.org:
Carlos Granada: 'The Act of Mourning consisted of first placing these candles in a very specific way, a reticular way, and then having people join us, having this installation that lasted six hours . . . is something that for us was very important because in Colombia''because of our political situation and our violence situation''we have become dehumanized and for me, what Doris was trying to do by this Act of Mourning was teach us how to mourn.'
Interview with MCA Chicago.
www.wikipedia.org:
Doris Salcedo (born 1958) is a Colombian-born visual artist and sculptor. Her work is influenced by her experiences of life in 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.
www.wikipedia.org:
Doris 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: Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and Politics of Memory, Andreas Huyssen dedicates a chapter to Doris 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 together 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 of Colombia to the international art audience.
During a conversation do, 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 upon this notion of the metamorphosis, describing the experience of the viewer 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 experience of the victim 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.'
Salcedo employs objects from the past, objects imbued with an important sense of history and, throughmporary memory sculptures, illustrates the flow of time. She joins the past and the present, repairs what she sees as incomplete and, in the eyes of Huyssen, presents 'memory at the edge of an abyss' ... memory in the literal sense' ... and memory as proces.