Doris Salcedo’s Installation in Bogotà as Tribute to Victims of Colombia’s Civil War

The installation by the Colombian artist Doris Salcedo was unveiled in Plaza Bolivar in Bogotá, Colombia yesterday (October 11): the artwork is paying homage to the victims of the country’s decades-old civil war.

In an act of protest against a civil conflict, the plaza was covered with a massive white shroud bearing the names of the war’s many victims.

Doris Salcedo was born in 1958 in Bogotá, Colombia. Salcedo’s understated sculptures and installations embody the silenced lives of the marginalized, from individual victims of violence to the disempowered of the Third World. Although elegiac in tone, her works are not memorials: Salcedo concretizes absence, oppression, and the gap between the disempowered and powerful. While abstract in form and open to interpretation, her works serve as testimonies on behalf of both victims and perpetrators. Even when monumental in scale, her installations achieve a degree of imperceptibility—receding into a wall, burrowed into the ground, or lasting for only a short time.