Este documental se realizó como parte de la exposición retrospectiva de Doris Salcedo, organizada por el Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Chicago entre los meses de febrero y mayo de 2015 y expuesta posteriormente en el Guggenheim de Nueva York.
Aquí un aparte del texto The lips of a wound de Liz Park donde se refiere a este video:
An integral part of the exhibition, the film Doris Salcedo Public Works highlights an important aspect of the artists practice and reveals the working process, the team of architects, researchers, and experts of all kinds who bring their own set of ideas and skills to the realization of her works. Salcedo’s contribution to the Istanbul Biennial in 2003, for instance, where she filled a vacant lot with a three-story pile of chairs, is a feat of engineering. Her celebrated 2007 installation Shibboleth at the Tate Modern Turbine Hall shook the earth and split open a chasm on the floor of an otherwise pristine contemporary art space (it was, notably, the first installation at Turbine Hall to “intervene directly in the fabric” of its architecture). Yet some of Salcedo’s public works consist of simple, vernacular gestures of commemoration. For Accion de Duelo (2007), Salcedo set 24,000 votive candles in Plaza de Bolívar in Bogotá, and as she began lighting them she soon found that others had joined in to help. When Colombian activist and journalist Jaime Garzón was assassinated on August 13, 1999, Salcedo mourned for a week, then hung a row of roses on a brick wall across his house. After passing another week, she returned to the wall, and covered its entire length with more roses. A year later on August 13, 2000, Salcedo once again paid homage to Garzón. This time, with his siblings, she laid down a path of roses from his home to the site of his murder, making visible the path no longer trodden by the departed.
In the role of artist as shaman, Salcedo calls upon the spirit of the missing and the dead in the form of public ceremony. In a New York Times review of this year’s exhibition in its Guggenheim iteration, Holland Cotter powerfully begins, “Politically speaking, you don’t have to be a house to be haunted. All you need to be is someone who keeps an eye on the news; who pays attention to loss through violence; and feels a personal stake in that loss, as if it were happening to people you know and care about, to people who live in your home.” The ceremonies that Salcedo performs invite anyone with a stake in the violence and trauma that pervades our contemporary life to a community of mourners. “There are so many massacres that take place in Colombia that we are no longer capable of responding,” Salcedo reflects.
Standing over the last work in the exhibition, A Flor de Piel (2014), an impressive carpet of fresh rose petals sutured together, I am asked to witness. By some alchemy, the petals remain supple ovals, delicately held together to blanket the whole space. It’s the farthest thing from rugged industrial felt, but nonetheless warm and full of life. Dedicated to a Colombian nurse who was tortured to death, the work acts as a full stop, concluding this exhibition’s long, lyrically-meandering sentence with many commas to indicate the necessary moments for pause. A tribute to a particular individual, A Flor de Piel beckons all who stand before it to take a stand as one among many, like the thousands of stitches that suture the lips of so many wounds.
Liz Park
texto completo en MOMUS
La semana pasada publicamos Adios a la Belleza, un texto de Guillermo Villamizar sobre la restrospectiva de Doris Salcedo en Nueva York.