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| Photo: Patrizia Tocci |
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| Photo: Patrizia Tocci |
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| Photo: Patrizia Tocci |
Doris Salcedo, an artist of vast expressive strength, a sculptor of memory and life, of poverty and of dignity, is presenting her most recent work: Plegaria Muda, an installation composed of over one hundred pairs of wooden tables, in which each one is turned over another, from which thin blades of grass emerge.
The artist has found inspiration by turning her gaze to the victims
of massacres by the army in Colombia, her home country, as well as the
violent deaths of the Los Angeles suburbs, where she conducted research
and recognized the effects of the same gratuitous and meaningless
violence found in every corner of the globe. Plegaria Muda is a prayer for those people who have no voice to speak of their existence and hence appear not to exist. However, Plegaria Muda is also, and above all, a tribute to life.
“The
process of investigation and reflection underlying this work was
painstaking. It began in 2004 with a trip around the ghettos of Los
Angeles and an official report which stated that over 10,000 young
people had suffered violent deaths over a twenty-year period.
…
Plegaria Muda seeks to confront us with repressed, unfathomed grief, and with violent death when it is reduced to its total insignificance and forms part of a silenced reality as a strategy of war.
It is also a response to a particular event that took place in Colombia between 2003 and 2009 in which approximately 1500 young people from deprived areas were murdered by the Colombian army for no apparent reason. It was clear, however, that the Colombian government had implemented a system of incentives and rewards for the army if they could prove that a greater number of guerrillas had been killed in combat. Faced with this system of rewards and incentives, the army began to hire young people from remote and deprived areas, offering them work and transporting them to other places where they were murdered and then presented as “unidentified guerrillas: discharged in combat”.
For months I accompanied a group of mothers who were both searching for their disappeared sons and identifying them in the graves revealed by the murderers. Later, I joined them in the painful and arduous process of living out their mourning and engaging in the vain attempt to achieve justice in the face of the barbarism committed by the state.
…
Plegaria Muda is an attempt to live out this grief, a space demarcated by the radical limit imposed by death. A space that is outside of life, a place apart, that reminds us of our dead.”
.
…
Plegaria Muda seeks to confront us with repressed, unfathomed grief, and with violent death when it is reduced to its total insignificance and forms part of a silenced reality as a strategy of war.
It is also a response to a particular event that took place in Colombia between 2003 and 2009 in which approximately 1500 young people from deprived areas were murdered by the Colombian army for no apparent reason. It was clear, however, that the Colombian government had implemented a system of incentives and rewards for the army if they could prove that a greater number of guerrillas had been killed in combat. Faced with this system of rewards and incentives, the army began to hire young people from remote and deprived areas, offering them work and transporting them to other places where they were murdered and then presented as “unidentified guerrillas: discharged in combat”.
For months I accompanied a group of mothers who were both searching for their disappeared sons and identifying them in the graves revealed by the murderers. Later, I joined them in the painful and arduous process of living out their mourning and engaging in the vain attempt to achieve justice in the face of the barbarism committed by the state.
…
Plegaria Muda is an attempt to live out this grief, a space demarcated by the radical limit imposed by death. A space that is outside of life, a place apart, that reminds us of our dead.”
.
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