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Sculptures and installations by Doris Salcedo embody the silenced lives of the marginalized. They evoke absence, oppression, and the gap between the disempowered and powerful. While abstract in form, her works serve as testimonies on behalf of both victims and perpetrators. They function as political and mental archaeology, being composed of materials charged with meanings accumulated over years of use in everyday life. Salcedo often takes specific historical events of Columbia as her point of departure: so these belongings, imbued with the patina of use, are directly linked to personal and political tragedy.

Atrabiliarios (1993) consists of four wooden niches, inside which are shoes covered up by cow’s bladder which is sewn with surgical thread and covered with wax. The title references the Latin expression “atra bilis”, which describes the melancholy associated with mourning. In line with the denunciation of social violence in her country of origin, in Atrabiliarios Salcedo has recovered the shoes she received from relatives of women who had disappeared in different rural areas of Colombia, especially in the context of los desaparecidos. The shoes, which retain the physical imprint of the person who used them and wich were often used to identify remains of those women, are ‘hidden’ or ‘silenced’ inside a box, in a clear metaphor for the lives of their owners.

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