www.museodememoria.gov.co:
Obra
Sumando ausencias fue una acción colectiva en la Plaza de Bolàvar de Bogotá en la que cientos de ciudadanos, bajo la dirección de Doris Salcedo, cosieron 1.900 pedazos de tela con los nombres escritos en cenizas de 1.900 vàctimas del conflicto armado. Durante seis dàas, los participantes se reunieron en el Museo de Arte de la Universidad Nacional, el Auditorio León de Greiff, el Claustro de San Agustàn y el Polideportivo del Claustro para plasmar los nombres de las vàctimas en un tamaà±o de 2,5 metros cada uno. El conjunto de telas blancas ocupó 7 kilómetros cuadrados y cubrió toda la Plaza de Bolàvar. La iniciativa surgió a raàz de la crisis del Acuerdo de Paz entre el Gobierno de Colombia y Farc tras el triunfo del NO en el plebiscito.
Translation:
Work
Adding absences was a collective action in the Plaza de Bolàvar de Bogotá in the fact that hundreds of citizens, under the direction of Doris Salcedo, were sewn to 1,900 pieces of cloth witare written in the ashes of 1,900 victims of the armed conflict. For six days, the participants gathered in the Museum of Art of the National University, the Auditorio León de Greiff, the Cloister of St. Augustine and the Sports center of the Cloister to translate the names of the victims in a size of 2.5 meters each. The set of white cloth held 7 square kilometers, and covered the entire Plaza de Bolivar. The initiative came in the wake of the crisis of the Peace Agreement between the Colombian Government and Farc, after the triumph of the NO in the plebiscite.
www.instituteforpublicart.org:
On the evening of 2 October 2016, the people of Colombia were faced with one of the most uncertain situations in their country's history. After four years of negotiations between the government and the largest insurgent group in South America, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), a small majority of the population '' motivated by a long campaign led by the former President àlvaro Uribe ''o reject a peace agreement that would have ended nearly 60 years of armed conflict and civil war. Peace was only denied to the people of Colombia by a margin of only half a percentage point. Public reaction was that of horror, many felt it was a devastating missed opportunity for peace. Fearing an imminent return to violence and understanding the dangers still remaining in such a volatile situation, tens of thousands of citizens began mobilising. In the days that followed two important initiatives responded to the vote and eventually came together: '˜Plantón por La Paz' (campground for peace), a citizen-organised protest camp occupied La Plaza Bolàvar (Bolàvar Square) in the country's capital Bogotá, and a public art installation by Doris Salcedo titled Sumando Ausencias (2016).
www.museodememoria.gov.co:
Contexto
Casi cuatro aà±os duraron las negociaciones para la terminación del conflicto entre el Gobierno y las FARC, la guerrilla más antigua de Colombia y de América Latina. En a con las lecciones aprendidas de procesos de paz como el de Guatemala (1996), El Salvador (1992) o Irlanda del Norte (1998), se reconoció la necesidad de involucrar a las vàctimas en las negociaciones.
La aprobación del Acuerdo de Paz, el primer brochazo de un largo camino hacia la desmovilización, se convirtió en un eje de polarización de la sociedad colombiana. Durante la primera parte del 2016 se vivió una etapa de gran incertidumbre frente al proceso. Cuando finalmente se llevó a las urnas para su aprobación y legitimación popular el 2 de octubre, éste fue rechazado por un margen de tan solo 0.5%.
Translation:
Context
Almost four years lasted the negotiations for ending the conflict between the Government and the FARC, the guerrilla oldest of Colombia and Latin America. In correspondence with the lessons learned from peace processes such as Guatemala (1996), El Salvador (1992) and Northern Ireland (1998), recognized the need to involve victims in the negotiations.
The approPeace Agreement, the first brushstroke of a long road toward demobilization, he became an axis of polarization of the colombian society. During the first part of 2016 experienced a period of great uncertainty, as opposed to the process. When they finally took to the polls for its approval and legitimacy popular on October 2, it was rejected by a margin of just 0.5%.
www.instituteforpublicart.org:
Doris Salcedo's urgent response to the vote was the latest work in a long artistic practice which has addressed and advocated for the people of Colombia caught up in generations of civil war. Her subject matter has been consistent for decades '' memory, forgetting, pain, trauma, and loss. Salcedo's sculpture and installation practice focuses on the experience of grief and mourning, and the connection between violence, anonymity and public space. She most often works with specific reference to her country of birth and home, Colombia. Since 1998 Salcedo has interviewed people whose family members have bdisappeared during Colombias conflict and illegal drug trade, creating art works that reference not only their brutal deaths but also the absence that is left behind. Salcedo gives her art works poignant titles, heavy with metaphorical meaning.
According to the Colombian website Arcadia a rumour began at the Universidad Nacional (National University) in Bogotá shortly after the vote to reject a peace agreement was announced regarding Salcedos desire to create an artwork in response to the vote. Shortly after, an email was sent to the entire campus: Doris Salcedo invites us to draw the names of victims of the decades-long conflict on seven kilometers of cloth and then put them together with needle and thread. In response, thousands of volunteers from around the city gathered early on the morning of 6th of October 2016 in La Plaza Bolívar. Created in collaboration with citizens and in collaboration with the Museo de la Universidad Nacional, Sumando Ausencias (Adding Absences) took the form of a banner or '˜shroud' across La Plaza Bolàvar. La Plaza Bolivar has been the focal point for many of the city's tragedies and triumphs. The Palace of Justice, twice rebuilt due to violence and attacks, stands there alongside the Cathedral and the National Capitol, which houses the government of Colombia. At this historical landmark, Salcedo worked with citizen volunteers to create Sumando Ausencias. Using 7,000 metres of fabric the protest camp inhabitants and other volunteers used ash to write some 2,300 names on white cloth. Gathered from the government's Registry of Victims, these names represented only a fraction, roughly 7%, of the victims of Colombia's civil war. Sumando Ausencias was an urgent and enormous artwork, created in just one week with the help of over one thousand volunteers. Once the names were complete on the morning of 11th October, Salcedo and the volunteers began to assemble the piece. Each sheet of cloth symbolising a death shroud was carried and laid down carefully by volunteers inof respect for the absent victims, then stitched together by hand over a period of 12 hours. Once complete, Sumando Ausencias covered the entire Plaza.
In Salcedo's own words, 'Sumando Ausencias is a work of art in which the victims of the armed conflict are put in the center of Colombia's political life by an ephemeral community formed during the making of the project: These were generous weavers who were able to gather in one single image the pain of thousands of families. The work is an act of mourning.' Reflecting on the use of ash to write the names of the '˜disappeared' and fallen she added 'the names are poorly written, almost erased, because we are already forgetting these violent deaths'. Laid over La Plaza Bolàvar, ground already shaken by political violence, Sumando Ausencias offered a powerful visual image of the ongoing anger and grief felt by individuals and families. Instigated by the artist but created by the people of Bogatá, the art work encapsulated their emotion while emory, and recognition of lives lost and peace denied.In this act of artistic empathy, Sumando Ausencias offers an intensely hand-worked devotional installation to evoke both the presence and the absence of human life. 'The manual labor inherent in her work is one way Doris allows herself to bear legitimate witness to awful stories of pain and suffering,' Madeleine Grynsztejn, of the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, has commented of Salcedo's practice. Created from everyday materials and the labour of people whose voices need to be heard and whose country was thrown into crisis by the vote, Sumando Ausencias confronts and emphasises structures of power and exploitation. Sumando Ausencias acts as a political and mental archaeology, acting to make visible collective trauma and offer symbolic and unifying elements for moving forward as a country. The art work does not suggest change or a solution, but allows the history and trauma to be acknowledged and honoured. In creating a collective experience throe making of the art work and by using humble, everyday materials and common skills, Salcedo explores craft as a tool for the construction of collective memory. 'Our past is something that we can build ourselves by the act of narrating it. To look back at it in the present allows for forgotten memories to resurface' the artist has said. Sumando Ausencias highlights the way memory functions in our contemporary society, where each new tragedy erases the previous one, but not the grief. Although monumental in scale and visually powerful, Sumando Ausencias is an intimate art work. Like many of Salcedo's public installations, this work was for victims and their families '' not the city, commissioning bodies, or even the art world. Instead, Sumando Ausencias confronts the usual structures that surround famous artists and art works with the ugly truth of death, civil war, and exploited communities. Sumando Ausencias is a public statement of mourning, but also of the desire for peace and the consequences of warCredits: Oscar Monsalve Image courtesy of the Artist and Alexander and Bonin, New York Source: Shanghai Academy of Fine Arts.
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 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.
www.wikipedia.org:
Doris Salcedo addresses the question of forgetting and memory in her installation artwork. In pieces such as Unland: he 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 the 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. '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 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 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 th 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, through these contemporary 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 process.
Obra
Sumando ausencias fue una acción colectiva en la Plaza de Bolàvar de Bogotá en la que cientos de ciudadanos, bajo la dirección de Doris Salcedo, cosieron 1.900 pedazos de tela con los nombres escritos en cenizas de 1.900 vàctimas del conflicto armado. Durante seis dàas, los participantes se reunieron en el Museo de Arte de la Universidad Nacional, el Auditorio León de Greiff, el Claustro de San Agustàn y el Polideportivo del Claustro para plasmar los nombres de las vàctimas en un tamaà±o de 2,5 metros cada uno. El conjunto de telas blancas ocupó 7 kilómetros cuadrados y cubrió toda la Plaza de Bolàvar. La iniciativa surgió a raàz de la crisis del Acuerdo de Paz entre el Gobierno de Colombia y Farc tras el triunfo del NO en el plebiscito.
Translation:
Work
Adding absences was a collective action in the Plaza de Bolàvar de Bogotá in the fact that hundreds of citizens, under the direction of Doris Salcedo, were sewn to 1,900 pieces of cloth witare written in the ashes of 1,900 victims of the armed conflict. For six days, the participants gathered in the Museum of Art of the National University, the Auditorio León de Greiff, the Cloister of St. Augustine and the Sports center of the Cloister to translate the names of the victims in a size of 2.5 meters each. The set of white cloth held 7 square kilometers, and covered the entire Plaza de Bolivar. The initiative came in the wake of the crisis of the Peace Agreement between the Colombian Government and Farc, after the triumph of the NO in the plebiscite.
www.instituteforpublicart.org:
On the evening of 2 October 2016, the people of Colombia were faced with one of the most uncertain situations in their country's history. After four years of negotiations between the government and the largest insurgent group in South America, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), a small majority of the population '' motivated by a long campaign led by the former President àlvaro Uribe ''o reject a peace agreement that would have ended nearly 60 years of armed conflict and civil war. Peace was only denied to the people of Colombia by a margin of only half a percentage point. Public reaction was that of horror, many felt it was a devastating missed opportunity for peace. Fearing an imminent return to violence and understanding the dangers still remaining in such a volatile situation, tens of thousands of citizens began mobilising. In the days that followed two important initiatives responded to the vote and eventually came together: '˜Plantón por La Paz' (campground for peace), a citizen-organised protest camp occupied La Plaza Bolàvar (Bolàvar Square) in the country's capital Bogotá, and a public art installation by Doris Salcedo titled Sumando Ausencias (2016).
www.museodememoria.gov.co:
Contexto
Casi cuatro aà±os duraron las negociaciones para la terminación del conflicto entre el Gobierno y las FARC, la guerrilla más antigua de Colombia y de América Latina. En a con las lecciones aprendidas de procesos de paz como el de Guatemala (1996), El Salvador (1992) o Irlanda del Norte (1998), se reconoció la necesidad de involucrar a las vàctimas en las negociaciones.
La aprobación del Acuerdo de Paz, el primer brochazo de un largo camino hacia la desmovilización, se convirtió en un eje de polarización de la sociedad colombiana. Durante la primera parte del 2016 se vivió una etapa de gran incertidumbre frente al proceso. Cuando finalmente se llevó a las urnas para su aprobación y legitimación popular el 2 de octubre, éste fue rechazado por un margen de tan solo 0.5%.
Translation:
Context
Almost four years lasted the negotiations for ending the conflict between the Government and the FARC, the guerrilla oldest of Colombia and Latin America. In correspondence with the lessons learned from peace processes such as Guatemala (1996), El Salvador (1992) and Northern Ireland (1998), recognized the need to involve victims in the negotiations.
The approPeace Agreement, the first brushstroke of a long road toward demobilization, he became an axis of polarization of the colombian society. During the first part of 2016 experienced a period of great uncertainty, as opposed to the process. When they finally took to the polls for its approval and legitimacy popular on October 2, it was rejected by a margin of just 0.5%.
www.instituteforpublicart.org:
Doris Salcedo's urgent response to the vote was the latest work in a long artistic practice which has addressed and advocated for the people of Colombia caught up in generations of civil war. Her subject matter has been consistent for decades '' memory, forgetting, pain, trauma, and loss. Salcedo's sculpture and installation practice focuses on the experience of grief and mourning, and the connection between violence, anonymity and public space. She most often works with specific reference to her country of birth and home, Colombia. Since 1998 Salcedo has interviewed people whose family members have bdisappeared during Colombias conflict and illegal drug trade, creating art works that reference not only their brutal deaths but also the absence that is left behind. Salcedo gives her art works poignant titles, heavy with metaphorical meaning.
According to the Colombian website Arcadia a rumour began at the Universidad Nacional (National University) in Bogotá shortly after the vote to reject a peace agreement was announced regarding Salcedos desire to create an artwork in response to the vote. Shortly after, an email was sent to the entire campus: Doris Salcedo invites us to draw the names of victims of the decades-long conflict on seven kilometers of cloth and then put them together with needle and thread. In response, thousands of volunteers from around the city gathered early on the morning of 6th of October 2016 in La Plaza Bolívar. Created in collaboration with citizens and in collaboration with the Museo de la Universidad Nacional, Sumando Ausencias (Adding Absences) took the form of a banner or '˜shroud' across La Plaza Bolàvar. La Plaza Bolivar has been the focal point for many of the city's tragedies and triumphs. The Palace of Justice, twice rebuilt due to violence and attacks, stands there alongside the Cathedral and the National Capitol, which houses the government of Colombia. At this historical landmark, Salcedo worked with citizen volunteers to create Sumando Ausencias. Using 7,000 metres of fabric the protest camp inhabitants and other volunteers used ash to write some 2,300 names on white cloth. Gathered from the government's Registry of Victims, these names represented only a fraction, roughly 7%, of the victims of Colombia's civil war. Sumando Ausencias was an urgent and enormous artwork, created in just one week with the help of over one thousand volunteers. Once the names were complete on the morning of 11th October, Salcedo and the volunteers began to assemble the piece. Each sheet of cloth symbolising a death shroud was carried and laid down carefully by volunteers inof respect for the absent victims, then stitched together by hand over a period of 12 hours. Once complete, Sumando Ausencias covered the entire Plaza.
In Salcedo's own words, 'Sumando Ausencias is a work of art in which the victims of the armed conflict are put in the center of Colombia's political life by an ephemeral community formed during the making of the project: These were generous weavers who were able to gather in one single image the pain of thousands of families. The work is an act of mourning.' Reflecting on the use of ash to write the names of the '˜disappeared' and fallen she added 'the names are poorly written, almost erased, because we are already forgetting these violent deaths'. Laid over La Plaza Bolàvar, ground already shaken by political violence, Sumando Ausencias offered a powerful visual image of the ongoing anger and grief felt by individuals and families. Instigated by the artist but created by the people of Bogatá, the art work encapsulated their emotion while emory, and recognition of lives lost and peace denied.In this act of artistic empathy, Sumando Ausencias offers an intensely hand-worked devotional installation to evoke both the presence and the absence of human life. 'The manual labor inherent in her work is one way Doris allows herself to bear legitimate witness to awful stories of pain and suffering,' Madeleine Grynsztejn, of the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, has commented of Salcedo's practice. Created from everyday materials and the labour of people whose voices need to be heard and whose country was thrown into crisis by the vote, Sumando Ausencias confronts and emphasises structures of power and exploitation. Sumando Ausencias acts as a political and mental archaeology, acting to make visible collective trauma and offer symbolic and unifying elements for moving forward as a country. The art work does not suggest change or a solution, but allows the history and trauma to be acknowledged and honoured. In creating a collective experience throe making of the art work and by using humble, everyday materials and common skills, Salcedo explores craft as a tool for the construction of collective memory. 'Our past is something that we can build ourselves by the act of narrating it. To look back at it in the present allows for forgotten memories to resurface' the artist has said. Sumando Ausencias highlights the way memory functions in our contemporary society, where each new tragedy erases the previous one, but not the grief. Although monumental in scale and visually powerful, Sumando Ausencias is an intimate art work. Like many of Salcedo's public installations, this work was for victims and their families '' not the city, commissioning bodies, or even the art world. Instead, Sumando Ausencias confronts the usual structures that surround famous artists and art works with the ugly truth of death, civil war, and exploited communities. Sumando Ausencias is a public statement of mourning, but also of the desire for peace and the consequences of warCredits: Oscar Monsalve Image courtesy of the Artist and Alexander and Bonin, New York Source: Shanghai Academy of Fine Arts.
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 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.
www.wikipedia.org:
Doris Salcedo addresses the question of forgetting and memory in her installation artwork. In pieces such as Unland: he 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 the 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. '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 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 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 th 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, through these contemporary 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 process.