Doris Salcedo: The Materiality of Mourning—Opening Celebration Lecture

good evening welcome to the Harvard Art Museum's and the opening celebration of our special exhibition dora salcedo the materiality of mourning my name is Richie howl and I'm a member of the Harvard Art Museum student board I'm a senior living in Cabot house and I concentrate in the history of art and architecture my name is Katie Wu and I'm a member of the Harvard Art Museum student guide program I'm also a senior in Cabot house and I concentrate in history and literature please be sure to turn off your cell phones and we kindly ask you to refrain from flash photography and now let us warmly welcome Martha Tedeschi the new Elizabeth and John Moores Cavett director of the Harvard Art Museum's who will introduce tonight's program thank you good evening everyone it's wonderful to see a crowd like this in here and just so you know there's another auditorium that's also filled where we'll have simultaneous projection so good evening and welcome to the Harvard Art Museum's I'm so pleased to welcome you all we're a group of tonight of students faculty Cambridge neighbors and friends to this special evening which marks the opening of our new exhibition Doris L say to the materiality of morning I hope many of you have already had a chance to have at least a sneak peek of the exhibition which has been open since two o'clock but you certainly if you haven't you'll have plenty of time to do so either tonight or in the days that come on behalf of my museum colleagues I want to extend our deep gratitude to Doris Salcido for bringing her remarkable work to Harvard and for working so tirelessly so thoughtfully and so collaboratively to realize an installation that is at once beautiful provocative and intensely moving we are proud to have this opportunity to share with all of you the artists startling mesmerizing seemingly impossible sculptures created as testimonies to the victims of civil and political violence this is Harvard Art Museum's fourth special exhibition since the opening of the new building in November 2014 and it's my first as the Elizabeth and John Moores Cavett director I feel so honored to be here at this auspicious moment to be part of such an important exhibition which I believe will stretch all of us to consider our roles and responsibilities as global citizens a perfect fit for our unique academic setting this exhibition speaks to the concerns of our campus and our community both local and global and it also draws on the extraordinary collaborative work of our curators and conservation scientists as they met the challenges and excitement of working with non-traditional materials this exhibition is asking all of us to stretch and to expand in new ways we're very grateful to so many who have supported this exhibition and I want especially to thank Nancy Nasser and David hems Sager the him Sager family Charles wood the third Miriam M wood foundation Margaret steed Hoffman Thomas Lentz Kathryn Marcus rose and William Rose Bridget and Bruce Evans Marc Decker and Deborah Coulson and Elaine eleven modern and contemporary art programs that the Harvard art museums are made possible in part by general support generous support from the Emily rau Pulitzer and Joseph Pulitzer jr. fund for modern and contemporary art support for tonight's program is provided by the M Victor Levin trip fund which was established through the generosity of the wife children and Friends of the late M vector Levin Tripp Harvard class of 1935 the purpose of the fund is to present the work of outstanding scholars of the history and theory of art to the Harvard and Greater Boston communities mmm I'm delighted to introduce the curator of this powerful exhibition Mary Schneider Enriquez she is the Houghton associate curator of Modern and Contemporary Art here at the Harvard art museums and she received her doctorate in the history of art and architecture here at Harvard writing her dissertation on the work of Doris Salceda her deep research and collaborative relationship with the artists are at the very heart of this exhibition and now please help me welcome Mary Schneider Enriquez Thank You Martha thank you all for being here it is as many of you know as she mentioned this was I've known Doris for many years this has been a very long road in a very positive light although this exhibition as she said is one that is certainly one that's meant to move you in ways that did not always make you smile but rather stop and make us think about the world today so it is with great appreciation that I thank so many of you in the museum and those of you who have helped by lending your works to this exhibition I'd like to thank Charlotte and her Wagner for lending their piece the I say of Boston and Jill Medvedev for lending their piece in particular the Neue gallery and Castle Germany and the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao as well as Carolyn Alexander and white cube gallery for helping us also secure more loans this is an exhibition that took an enormous amount of work and help and real enthusiasm and support from a variety of people in the museum's as well I could not have done this without the extraordinary support of our former director and chief curator Tomlinson Debbie cow deputy director Maureen Donovan and our conservation staff Narayan Kondo car as well as our my colleagues in mod con Lynette Roth and Sarah Qian offski and Dakota DeVos who has been stepped up to the plate early on and helps with everything as a curatorial assistant and Jessica Martinez and our public and academic programs group which is phenomenally in supportive and enthusiastic and in communications Zach Jensen and Mike Abbas who have actually helped make what was my dissertation and many of you know how a dissertation can be a kind of clunky organism and made it into the book and catalog you can find in the gift shop which to me is something is not only many years in the making as many of you know but that is a work of great emotional intellectual and even physical kind of kind of commitment on my part and many others who help me and in that note I want to make a special side thanks to Dean Margot Gill and to Professor Tom comments who all along this long road for me of doing this dissertation were they're saying you can do it Mary you can make it happen and then the museum's forthrightly gave me all the support to bring this music this exhibition to fruition so I think so many of you and and finally to add in the installation of the last eight days it was an all day every day through the weekend process in which every gallery you see upstairs was a specific installation for our site this moment and an extraordinary statement by the artist with her amazing team of Carlos Ingrid and Joaquin working with our staff and our collections management group who were beyond the pale in their commitment and their energy and their enthusiasm and trying to be part of helping to realize something that to me as you can tell it means an enormous amount so I think all of you now before I go into further I just want to make sure to note the work is very powerful as you've seen upstairs and the content and some of this work is something difficult for many and I I think it's important that that be raised and people are aware of that Doris's work from the beginning has had to do with political violence and this is something that moved me early on and was something that made me really focus on how her sculpture how her installations how her work in public spaces really touched upon a subject that so many have tried to and try to articulate and try to respond to but in a very different way Doris addresses political violence through sculpture and installations by creating a material presence that evokes the unnamed victims of oppression and civil conflict born in Bogota where she still lives and works she's borne witness to the violence that has plagued her country for more than 30 years and I say this at this particular moment with an extraordinary amount of emotion because as we all know and had I no idea five years ago when I started working on this exhibition that it would come to fruition and open literally within the month that the peace referendum in Bogota was voted down tragically that is been a process of years and years and years and years and years and years of work that never reached the point of positive possibility as it did with this referendum and sadly was not voted in it was a moment that I lived even though I was here in Cambridge very vividly knowing that Doris and her team would respond to something that was a very complicated and very sad moment in Colombia's political history in early October by creating on site a public installation in the center of Bogota so what we're seeing upstairs is one aspect of Doris's work very specific sculptures of various periods of time that deal with using a materiality to express a means of mourning those who have been lost those of the unburied dead those who have suffered and the victims who remain what she continues to do and is one of the reasons it gives me incredible hope and spirit and inspiration is to this day she is still tackling and making us all think about what this kind of political violence does to families to loved ones to communities to everyone and not only in Colombia and this is really an important part of what I speak of what her work in Colombia and that she lives there but she addresses issues that are very much of the world today as an example and a backdrop before we begin our conversation with Elaine Scarry and Doris I'm going to go through briefly a history of her work to give you a context also for what you see upstairs in this exhibition the materiality of more but I should also add DeRosa's presence as a sculptor an international kind of Fame for this has so much to do with not only the subject but her abilities as a sculptor and as an artist she has been showing since the 90s in a variety of shows from individual kind of solo shows at the Tate at the new Museum in New York she's also had public installations both in Bogota also in the Istanbul Biennial and Shibboleth at the Tate Modern she is also one a series of prizes most recently this last April she won the first national international sculpture prize which was first off an extraordinarily important prize second a woman winning this prize was something I have to say was a real statement of their commitment to how important her work was and for all of us to know internationally she also has received the Hiroshima art prize in 2014 and the Premio of velázquez the art dysplastic as in Spain up until the exhibition you're about to see or have seen already upstairs she had a travelling retrospective that opened in Chicago went on to the Guggenheim in New York and then closed just this summer in Miami so her work has been widely seen in the world and is it a great honor to bring it here for you today the kind of work that she is known for first began in the 90s with everyday found furniture that she then filled with cement placed in a gallery setting and within that cement at least early on in her work you would see the remnants of fabric the torn blouse of a woman the bodice of a little girl's dress the Turin cuff of a man's shirt so that as you came forward and looked closely at these works of cement furniture pieces as you see here is an installation of many of them together you began to actually read that although there is no body present no face given no name given no particular moment given of an violent incident you're very much aware that something has occurred and there's an enduring sense of the absence of those persons lost or people lost but again what is really important and what drew me to her work in the beginning was that it was not about articulating and absent a face a figurative or narrative story of the victims but rather giving us the sense of those bodies no longer there and a space for us to mourn she also created this very clear sense as I said using found furniture of taking the familiar from the most private intimate spot in our home where we are meant to be the safest and changing it in such a way that we were forced to see a new something that once familiar now made strange and deeply unsettling in this series called the La Casa Buda she takes a doorframe fills it as you see in the detail on the right with what is lace pressed against it and a sliver of bone at what would be the the pane of the glass but on either side of it is like the headboard and baseboard of a bed is it stuck against the wall it's obviously strangely and perversely and incanting ly forced into a place where it should not be and that kind of unsettling feeling was very much a part of what we were to experience another important part of her work these this is the unknown series that dates from the later 90s these three tables actually each especially elongated strange in their elongation split and joined together one in the far back has a crib turned over and stuck into to its surface each of them have a surface in which she has done an enormous amount of hand labor to make this surface something you look closely at her work is meant for close careful slow contemplative looking it is not about a fast walk through the gallery and as you may have noticed upon entry the gallery upstairs the lighting is low it is it is a serene and quiet space there's ample space around the pieces so that you walk into the space and you feel your own body's reaction and your eyes adjust and they look closer at what you're looking at and the furniture and its surface and as you see here in this detailed image of one of these tables the orphans tunic you find that they're in the surface as you look closely is actually cloth and hairs sewn into the wood painstaking careful use of your hand over and over making the impossible a reality and this is very much a part of what her work is about looking closely at what she is created you see the amount of work and the detail and the focus and every single aspect of what is before you and you realize at the same time that is how in the world did she do that again and again in her work that is a very important part of what you see upstairs you'll see this pair of works there untitled cement furniture pieces meant to address you as you walk into the exhibition in your first view they explained so much of what she does all through her career but but in which you have these familiar bureaus or chests but they've been thrown over unto their sides forced together filled with cement and at the top you have these two elongated what would be kitchen tables but but elongate in a way that is somewhat strange creating two sculptures that together make one statement both of which are strangely kind of anthropomorphic there's an animal or or monster like quality to them just says the home or your street or the market you always go to can never be the same once violence has occurred it has forever changed and no matter how it looks the next day with the sun shining and the walls white it will never be the same space just as these four pieces of furniture reveal to us never will they be this in the next room and the gallery upstairs you have valise our stainless steel chairs which were the first work she created from raw material not from found objects which as you look closely at these it she has taken the idea or the model vote as a basic chair and created it in stainless steel contorted it flipped the legs ripped the surface of the seats open stuck them together in a way that is is once incredibly violent and also extraordinarily powerful they are placed in the gallery in a way that there's no sense no rhyme no reason no harmony there's no way to explain why they are where they are and that is also deliberate to set you off to be unsettling you for you to see that there is nothing about this room that's make you give you a space that's comfortable but rather for you to be looking closely at what it is you see the detail work on these chairs every wood bit of wood grain every gouge every nail head is carved by hand so again this attention to detail is extraordinarily important one of the things that's been important about this exhibition that we're going to talk further about is the idea the materiality of mourning what I mean by that is what doris has done throughout her career is taken materials used them in such a way that she creates a statement a means of addressing through materials what political violence does and the morning we live with and should address going forward creating a space for that materials and under Doris's hand and with through her eye are things that she has pushed to do what you would never expect them to do in this installation called peggotty amudha that she did from 2008 to ten she flips those tables that we've now seen that I actually kind of mimic the idea of a of a coffin flips one atop the other there's soil between and it's impossibly grass grows through the the upturned table in each of these as they're spread through the space walking through it fills you with a sense of calm peace as if you're walking through a graveyard but there's this this unbelievable sense that hope is possible because these shoots of green grass pierced through the wood grain and give you a sense of life beneath the death and again using materials in a way unexpected the organic justice that grass was upstairs you'll see a florida pn which to me was one of the most dramatic risky works she had created and I spent a year-and-a-half convincing the Harvard Art Museum's we should own it taking that risk to a point because working closely with our conservation staff I said if you can so rose petals together and create this tapestry we need to know how to take care of it and allow it to exist forever and our conservation staff was ready for that challenge and together we're learning installing this work is an extraordinary work of art in and of itself in watching Doris do it was was incredible but this room filled with thousands of rose petals sutured together to create this tapestry as a shroud a flower shroud to a woman a nurse who was tortured to death it is something that both speaks to the kind of mourning that one would want to experience for this poor woman who was never allowed a burial but becomes a kind of a kind of skin of flowers a very not fragrant so much as a very fragile enduring sense of through all of these this sewing that went on with thousands and thousands of rose petals a lasting statement of remembering her but remembering so many others and mourning those lost to political violence the process by which she created these roses and took materials to a place they never would necessarily have gone is something that is a focus of this exhibition and something that we have learned a lot about and through with Doris as she keeps pushing and pushing materials to help us see and feel what this loss is about you see another one of those and then finally the last gallery upstairs but not least your most recent work just remembered in which she created with individual raw silk threads and needles blackened and inserted within the threads these cloaks which are hanging invisibly against the wall as a reminder of the kind of pain that so many mothers of in fact she I should add most importantly evolved every work that she creates comes out out of years of interviewing or well not years in every case but weeks and and much time spent interviewing victims and family members of violence so that she comes at the work with this very clear sense of what people have endured this particular work came after an extended period of time of interviewing mothers of children lost to gun violence in the projects in Chicago and the feeling that these women and parents feel of people think of mourning is something that ends but in fact it's a condition that continues it is there it is present it is constant and their silence and meant to get on with life which never in fact occurs close looking at this work both deeply disturbs you and also allows you to see both a beauty and a really frightening Lee unnerving sense of that deep emotion and sense of pain that endures in addition to these individual works of sculpture there are quite a number of public works that Doris has created and I will very quickly touch on a couple because I'd like for us to talk further about all of this work as we sit down together in a moment this is one of her first well not the first because she has done several works that are in public spaces but this work was done in as on the anniversary which is actually coming up of the November 6th 7th horrible fire that and and tragedy that consumed the Palace of Justice in downtown Bogota in which the entire Supreme Court and many others were killed after guerrillas entered the space and the military then took over and a fire began and it destroyed the entire building right in the center of Bogota as a means of commemorating this which the state never did she created a performance piece that began at exactly the moment on November 6th in which the tragedy began but in the year 2002 in which as you see in the top left-hand corner a single chair begins to be lowered over the facade of what is now the new Palace of Justice there and over the course of the next two days following the sync sequence of hours in which this tragedy occurred chair after chair goes down the side of the facade each obviously representing or suggesting bodies lost as we think about a chair and we think about the furniture that is so important to her work bodies the trace of body is always there and this domestic furniture we're all so familiar with and it's very vividly poignant when you when this this performance occurred chairs were also used in her Istanbul Biennial insertion into a vacant lot actually in a section of Istanbul 1550 chairs all collected from throughout Turkey and then placed in the most incredible both chaotic but deliberately constructed wall of chairs such as you see a passerby walking by and seen both marveling at what this is and the sense of all those different bodies that once would have sat on there on those chairs and there absent very vividly presented in a haunting manner and Shibboleth or extraordinary crack that went through the turbine hall at Tate Modern in 2007 doing the impossible early in which she created this crevasse that went through the entire length of turbine Hall how she got permission to do this remains an incredible secret which we all marvel at and in fact as I presented the idea of an exhibition at the Harvard Art Museum's and I never told you this doris at one point as we were discussing layout and how things were gonna need to be and someone said well that's not gonna happen that's not gonna happen and I looked at them I said she convinced the Tate to put a crack in their floor that will always be there do you honestly think we can tell her we're not going to do this and everybody stopped so this extraordinary cracker is now filled in but the scar like the scar of the mourning and the pain that continues with so many remains and will always remain and last but not least we will talk about her most recent public action that occurred in Bogota in early October now let her talk more about that later this is just something that was just created October 11th and very much a communal extraordinary response to the voting down of the peace referendum so I'm gonna go back a minute today in addition to having me talk about this obviously I'm so excited to welcome Doris and Elaine Scarry to talk Elaine Scarry as I'm sure you all know teaches at Harvard where she is the Kabat professor of aesthetics and the general theory of value her writings include the body in pain beauty and being just and most recently thermonuclear monarchy choosing between democracy and doom her essays appear in best American Essays of 2007 5 and 1995 a Guggenheim Fellow she has also been a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Berlin at the at the Center for Advanced Study in the behavioral sciences at Stanford and at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles she lectures widely on programs and literature medicine and law but at the beginning of my thought process in bringing this exhibition to life I'd always wanted to have two people I admire to know and sit together in a room and talk Elaine Scarry and Doris I'll say though Elaine's book the body in pain Doris said to me years ago was something so fundamentally important to everything she's done and she thinks about deeply and to bring these two incredible individuals together and over the last few weeks I should say months of working with both of them independently and together it has been a great pleasure to watch these two great minds and two creative geniuses in my opinion talk and think aloud I now welcome you both together and let's sit in front and talk can you hear me one of the things actually just today we were talking about which I'd like to start this conversation I was how both have you talked about how art whether written or visual it's a difficult thing for people to express it's a difficult thing for people to express pain in a way in which it really evokes it and those who are receiving or seeing who reading or spending time with the object or the written word actually perceive it and I wonder Elaine if you might share a little more about how you think about that because it's something we discussed when we walked through the exhibition with Doris well it's so striking in Doris's work that she does on behalf of those who have been subjected to pain make it visible or tactile to us and she does that as has been mentioned several times while also bringing before us the beauty of the world and the beauty of of creation and this is especially striking because I think it's very rare even among artists who are able to do so many impossible things it's even rare for artists to be able to express physical pain on behalf of those who can't themselves express it we know that physical pain is language destroying the number of literary works there's a statement made by Virginia Woolf the very school girl when she falls in love has Shakespeare or Keats to speak her mind for her but let someone suffer a headache and language at once runs dry and of course the kind of pain that is occurring the countries where dice has been doing it work much more something much graver than a headache but the number of works I really just think there are a handful of works that really managed to express physical pain I think of Sophocles Phillip T DS a play about something abandoned on an island because it's in a woundedness but that was causing him to shriek out and howl and I'm so offended Odysseus and his comrades that they had to shut them off onto an island and they also didn't like the smell of the wound and so forth and until they learned that the only way they were going to win the trojan war was to stop the war long enough to contemplate what the nature of injury was and only if they did that but they they win the war and so there's a tiny number of works that did that and I would say that sometimes people will say to me works that they think communicate physical pain and and of course they're gonna be variations in what people find successful but sometimes the works that they're citing are almost seen from the point of view of the people inflicting the pain certainly a lot of things in American media where there's bodies blowing up all over again are not anything I could understand as being about physical pain they're about the power of those who are immune to pain the power of those shooting the guns are shooting the the drones or even the immunity of us watching it but to actually put us there in the situation of people who are in pain and to express that through the most intimate objects I think is is really very very unusual and we were looking at Doris's works we talked about especially with the rose-petal piece the idea of this the wound and the flesh and this woman who'd been tortured and you had some very interesting your your questions about the roses and the suturing relates I mean to me it related in some way to this sense of thinking about how to express without vividly expressing yeah I think that piece and probably many of you saw it upstairs and I know from speaking to some of you over the last few weeks that that that's a piece that many of you knew even before this opened but it's it's on the one hand as many said a shroud and on the other hand seems very close to a spreading pool of blood I when I go back there I almost expect it to have migrated closer to me that is to have expanded and yet at the same time it has the kind of salute to the the the power of creation to lift facts of the body to lift the interior out into a public shareable space a piece of clothing even something simpler than a piece of clothing like a piece of gauze is a kind of mimesis of the human skin and our clothing is a kind of projection of the human skin and in this case the the kind of fact of of the body I think it's been calculated that the square inches of our body is something like three thousand square inches and yet in that in that expanse of bodily surface you know of these tiny little openings your eyes that are taking in vast amounts of information and these tiny openings in your ears that are taking in huge amounts of information in your fingertips scientists can't even understand how the ridges of our fingertips translate these powerful information about touch but when I see both this piece and the piece and the adjacent room called disremember of the four blouses or shirts there's there is that one is almost you know a transcription of our own fingertips those ridges and our fingertips are not there so that the police can correctly identify us once we've done something wrong but that can happen but to to take in and that the kind of all that's that is really magnificent in the world and they think both of these peen Doris's work if when you go through the four rooms you not only see the kind of conjunction of beauty and injury that are very rarely brought together I think successfully and there has been talked about from the opening moments tonight but you also see her working with on the one hand the are negotiable heavy like in the first two rooms of the furniture that is this is uh negotiable this thing that we're here this pain this morning on the other hand something so delicate and exquisite as Mary said that it seems as though it is coming midway in the air between mental creation and material creation it's as though it's an idea in the mind that has just begun to move into the world of material realization and see I mean the the seeing that that piece and and I happen to come in at the tail end of it being installed so I got to hold in my hand one of the rose petals which is so transparent I could see married rings to it and could also see the suturing in it and could also see three the the variance of the flower petals themselves which on some flowers are the kind of honey guides for for bees but the the the piece has a kind of salute to the incredible powers of sentience that put me in mind and as I said to DARS and Mary everybody has their own associations with roses like we we learned that roses are a major export from the country and that's part of the reason for the choice of the roses but for me one thing I think of as well cos many poems about roses the poet Rilke the Austrian German poet yes many poems about roses his own epitaph involves roses and he associates them with eyelids themselves one of his problems is called a bowl of roses and it starts out unaccountably or this was unaccountable to me till I saw her work it starts out with a stanza that's about two boys in a horrible fight just baring their teeth just swirling hatred at each other and then suddenly abruptly by the second stanza it moves to a bowl of roses and talks about the the the the ability of rose petals to both occupy space without taking up space and goes on for there for about you know five or six stanzas but I felt that that that is part of what one sees in the presence I can go on and Express I'm sure you keep on and every but maybe I'll stop as we talked before a fleur de piel you you very clearly Doris talked about the process to to create this and the the thinking about how you make you were very clear with you know people often ask you when you create art are you responding to a particular incident a particular person and and you've been very clear to articulate what what your art is and why it is what it is as opposed to a illustration of a particular situation the Florida pail is one example of many but you're moved to create and what role do you do you see this piece that you create doing whether it's a Florida paella or another one when I was thinking of the experience of this victim of torture for whom I made this piece I was completely completely lost when you face torture and horror and we look at it and think of it very closely then you become just as silent as as the victim herself I didn't know I didn't know what I was completely lost and confused and then I found your book and and I think you make me aware of the political consequences of remaining silent and and I really admire the way you immerse yourself in pain and I understood completely what it took you I'm sure it was very very very difficult and sort of extreme situation because once you you you develop this empathy towards victims you start feeling the pain yourself and the way you describe it it was clear that you were feeling it so you were a very important source of inspiration for that piece and I start like I'm for your book I gather strength and I continue working on the piece and with a very simple intention I just wanted to present a flower offering to a victim of torture and but then I said wondering how do I come close to that but even if I wanted to an attempt to heal it it's impossible to come close to to this kind of paint at a pain and so I decided to look for the most fragile for the more vulnerable and making a piece that was almost impossible almost impossible of the pain she was feeling of course not not quite but but for me as a sculptor I had to look for the most fragile and and there's nothing more fragile in the world than a body in pain so that's why I chose the material and that's why everything else came along like the color of the piece the sutures everything had to had to honor that experience so it is the experience of the victim who is requirement for my work to exist when I am I'm just like a connector I connect the thinking of intelligent extraordinary people like inane philosophers of poets with the experience of victims with the extraordinary knowledge of the team of people that kindly work with me generously work with me so all these come together so my solitary work of an artist it's also a communal act as a collective act where everything comes together it is the time in which we live it is the knowledge we have of the time in which were living it is the writing of the curators it is the the generosity of a place that like this museum that is accepting my work it is all that I come together and make the piece possible but it is collective and since we're talking about art and the internal ones we are talking about art everything is paradoxical so it is solitary work that makes this collective art that produces the species very powerful point one of the things tonight when LED Lena and we walked upstairs will see if I can get this to work right so I'm still trying to figure out how to surround my okay is not just the works that are of of this incredible detail and and fragility but also the works that clearly have a solidity and as you say they're unforgiving they're not unmoving have a profound sentient give a very profound sense of what people have endured and and very much a great deal of kind of unsettling deep feelings occur and you commented on this when it upstairs this afternoon there were a lot of people in the gallery the last time you'd seen it it was empty and just these works and you turned to me and said I can't figure out I can't aux re ticket obviously far better than I will I wonder if you'd comment on this too because it's a very different kind of work and materiality than the rose petals and yet it had the same yeah please share a little of your thought yeah well I mean it is in part the heaviness the gravity a physicist colleague of mine was just telling me that young physicists now learn no have figured out that it's not just the C's that react to gravity that the Earth's crust actually rises and falls eight inches a day twice a day and these pieces make very palpable that that fact of gravity and of of things that can't just be blinked away the the gorgeous exquisite pieces of dis remembered of the shirts with needles and silk you almost could blink and think they might disappear but with these other pieces the one feels the immensity of the human cost that's involved and the the pieces are clearly or at least in my mind clearly on the on the cusp between making and unmaking between creating and on creating and they you know as Darcy said and as Mary says in her book the the fact of putting heavy material in them in a way that looks like they've been jammed or force memorializes the fact of aggression and at the same time you can recover the fact that these objects in our world what our civilization does in making objects I'm an entire civilization I mean world civilization not one country or one hemisphere the you know like for the example that that is easiest for me to use as chairs like right now all of us are almost all of us in this room are sitting on chairs and the chair takes over a very concrete fact of the body the spine our spines aren't completely good at bearing our own weight so we take care of that problem by making a chair that that takes over the work of the skeleton and lets us think about other things and but that that is an amazing thing one can go through almost any object and see that that it isn't just a kind of crude externalization of a body parts it is it is actually this really profound act of creation where imagine I'm the original creator of a chair I look at a fellow human being I see that there's a problem of body weight let's say for example the person let's say the person is pregnant or let's say the person has an injury that makes it hard to stand or let's just say it's a normal person who has neither there's neither carrying a child or carrying an injury but I see then it sits there and I get the immersiveness of it enough that I wish it were gone then that act means that it's both an act of perception and a counterfactual act of imagining because it's I'm both seeing it and I'm wishing it to be otherwise and if you could say well what does that look like in the brain when someone can't see there's a problem and then wish it God what it looks like is the chair that is the chair memorializes the structure of that perception and the tables and cabinets one can equally say the same up like a table if you look back over many many centuries for example I think of this one book on medieval philosophers by a woman named Mary Carruthers she points out how often people in the midst of creating are in a lying down position they're lying on a bed like Boethius and the consolation of philosophy or like the people in the Greek symposia but you know it isn't always easy to create on the floor so what we do is we make a piece of the floor rise up so that we can still be on all fours but but have part of the floor coming up and we call that a table that's a pretty amazing fact but this and again it's a combination of a perception that in order to create we would be helped by having a piece of the floor raised up on a pedestal so he didn't have to be down on all fours or so he could be on all fours but in a sitting position but it's it's also in in her work the unmaking of these objects in war and in torture and I found and I see in these works that in the torture room I mean torture occurs in countries all over the world including of course and and and we know that the school of America's helped teach people in other countries how to torture but even though it's widespread geographically the structure of it is very very narrow and repetitive it's the same wherever it occurs and part of what it does it wants to unmake the mental objects in a person's brain and you know that when when a hammer hits your hand or when a dentist's drill hit your your my nerve I'm realizing that some of you are too young to have ever had that know about the problem of teeth but the rest of us do in anyway when that happened you see stars and what's meant by saying is see stars is that all the objects of consciousness have collapsed now amazingly one thing that happens in torture whatever country you go to is that even if they have an instrument for inflicting pain such as some kind of electrical device or or whips or whatever they take whatever domestic objects are there and enlisted into the act of torture in order to act out this feature of the unmaking of the mental contents of what happens in pain and and I mean that happens in torture it happens in war but just staying with torture for a moment some in some countries that will use features of the wall or the ceiling or a door like rapidly vaulting and on bolting the door so that the prisoner is always in a state of high anxiety or they will use a bathtub or a refrigerator or a table or a chair and the names of the torture will also often be the names of things that ordinarily in civilization are very generous generous inventions for example in one country there was a form of torture called Motorola like that's like a record player and one there was a torturer called the playing ride in another there was what one called tea party and another there was called tea party and toast and so these these objects in in in Darcis work both somehow keep us mindful of the large as the large spiritedness of ordinary human making and not only not only human making when it's done by some brilliant artists but human making as it's done by a daily act by by all of us and at the same time the kind of loss that comes from from torture and war and political violence Wow thank you I know in many conversations I've had with Duras what you so beautifully and painfully articulated is something that is something that is very much behind a lot of what you think about and has informed much of what goes into your own work I in different ways yeah this this when I was when I began making these pieces I was interviewing widows whose partners have been both male and female have been murdered and I was interviewing these widows in their in their homes so they were living with the objects that actually belonged to the deceased partner and so these objects were constantly screaming the absence of that person so I was my point of departure was looking for an absence but of course that I was unreachable that was beyond my reach there was nothing I could do to reach this this person because the person was gone I know I could see with what's an empty space and silence so I start working with these pieces of furniture and and trying to I was aware that it was an act that would be in vain but in vain trying to in a way reconcile past tense and present and and absence and and memories and pain and brutality and and acts of love and all that together and try to smudge this together in one image that could we could have all these meanings Immelt aeneas lee so the word that's why there are many not only these but many of these pieces with with concrete where they were their objects are just telling us about this absence it's like like time is out of hands it's something that it's that is absurd that he can never be because violence destroys everything is trolling the relationship we have with time with people everything so that's why the pieces are so absurd and they they can never really make sense that's why they are so so odd and then that is I see that both violence and morning they're they're huge there's something much much bigger than us and I wanted these huge silence to be present in the work and therefore you don't see a traces of human work it is that though these pieces have been made by a force that is beyond our control and it's really a human I think it's important since I'm working and always addressing political violence I think it's important to know we place myself only on only a human looking to towards and hoping for the human but not quite which in them yeah I think that that the presence of human work is very vividly present in in all these pieces I mean as Mary says in this catalogue a book which is in itself an exquisite book Darcis work has about it this rigor and fastidiousness and I sometimes I sometimes teach course on on labor and how it gets represented in literature and it's it's an interesting thing that literature can much more easily talk about love stories then it can talk about work because love stories have a kind of narrative arc you wanted to meet somebody you sort of met someone you did meet them hooray or or not but with work although I mean you know an awful lot of our time is spent in work we're not always spending time and lovemaking or love courting and yet how do you represent work because if you take any form of work if you take any form of work let's say I had one friend was a dairy farmer and he had in a whole year not even been to the nearest little town because he was starting in the morning and doing the same acts and then the next day would do the same accent it would and the milking would occur in the morning that would occur again at night at cetera or if you take my own labor I'm doing the same thing every day and you can never get the immensity of what a piece of work is by tracking this repetitive labor and yet it's that repetitive labor that transforms the world I mean it lets us restore our own calories that we've expended and hopefully gives us enough of a surplus so that we can give some to a sibling etc and and and so forth but how do you represent that and I think that another thing about these artworks is that you do see the beauty of repetitive labor I mean you understand the what the works make visible the the power of the small repetitive acts of suturing each rose petal putting the needles and the raw silk in the shirts and is it is it each shirt has 14,000 needles ensure it has 14,000 needles in it it's a lot of time spent during iterative acts and but the but but it's out of the iterative acts that that you have these kind of collective outcomes like being able to sustain yourself and if you're lucky or maybe even doing it enough that other people become the beneficiaries of it yeah this is a great excuse yeah and it is building memory with each single needle that we are we're building memory we're building meaning and it's only through bringing this this this gesture that through them completely absurd amount of repetitive gestures that the meaning will come through otherwise you will never be there and for us and I'm talking in Perl because I'm as I said before it's a collective work for us it is very important to start with so from zero we start from nothing we have no knowledge what we're doing because each piece as you have seen has a different material and therefore requires different activity so we're trying to figure out how to how to do this pieces and it's always from the unknown that we start and we actually stay in the unknown until the piece is finished and then once the pieces finish was starting they're known all over again creating this meaning by adding with three years and the trial of error trying to create these images trying to be faithful to the testimony that have been given to me and that's that's what I'm really looking on looking for in the making of each single piece so that's why the making of each piece takes years years of trying years of of finding the way to be more accurate to be more precise to be more faithful the more accurate way to erase myself from very much and allowed really the experience of this thickness to come to come forth I always feel that that I'm especially when the work is present I think that my presence is absolutely brilliant now have a new both talked with such eloquence I feel I'm talking totally inadequate yeah actually at all yes it is the work that should be talking over people like you and interpreting it lets you be talking all through our preliminary discussions each of us tried to persuade the other two to do this evening tonight into it you just talk it's true and I kept saying it kept saying you Mary you can keep talking about no no they want to hear you to talk to each other which I've been thrilled to hear it I wonder if we might look for a moment at the public works because this is something you and I began our first conversation about this one in particular was one that and but but also leading up to your most current work you had very strong been thinking about the passage of time thinking about the chairs you had many many questions for me and and yeah I mean even the pieces that we've already talked about them could be said to be performance pieces in the sense that you can see the action of creation and you can see the action of on creating in them but in these these profound event based artworks some of the features that you see in the still life works you become even more vivid because we've talked about the way in which civilization is visible into something like a chair or a table or a blouse but of course civilization is also present in the invention of law or the invention of medicine and those two those things too are systematically dismantled in torture and again in war and I mean in in and and we know that in the United States for example the physicians the psychologists who assisted in making the books that that sanctioned waterboarding and other forms of torture that that was enlisting the practice of medicine and dismantling the practice of medicine in the midst of that but in this case in the event the 1985 event where 11 of the 12 Supreme Court justices were killed as well as a hundred or so other people there's a literal unmaking I mean this is the most literal way possible the institution of law it was was was slaughtered and and this particular act where where Darth unfolded over time started at a certain hour minute of the day when the event itself in an earlier year had begun and and and how she did this this is a mystery she she didn't have permission to do this she started it we know there's a theme to that there was no aprea noun sment to the people walking by that this was going to happen it wasn't a pre-arranged audience it just began to unfold and I can only imagine the effect of being there it must have seemed like just being sucked back into history into a vortex and watched the whole thing run running backwards yeah I was like that it was we started out 11:35 a.m. on November 6 17 years after the event had taken place and we slowly lower one chair at the moment when the first person had been killed one guard when the gorillas were driving in the garage and then over the course of two days the the old chairs were slowly moving on the surface at different tempos and at that time nobody was talking about this terrible event it's like it happened and any women quiet very quiet I felt like I was the only person upset by by this event and I felt that it was very important to create this this space to commemorate these victims and all of a sudden being there on the street people on the street in front of the building every passerby must but not every but almost every passerby was telling me what they were doing 17 years prior how they remember the event so it was a memory it was pretty much alive but suppress I mean so for me it's very important to bring these memories that are abandoned that I'm forgotten that are effaced and then bring them to the present so we and I think in the present is when we have the possibility of narrating again this event and and maybe recovering some of the dignity we lost during the violent act and I think that's that's what art can do and it is this irrepressible need to remember for families for whoever is willing to remember should be articulated in a work of art I think this kind of this act of mornings as I call them I think are important for that reason and important for society we cannot just forget every single massacre every single act of mourning I think it is immoral we we have the responsibility only of we're not responsible only for for the future well responsible for the past mainly so as an artist I think that I get that I can somehow help a little bit rewriting narrating putting putting articulating in in sculptural language of course more bearable these events of the past before we go and before I don't know how much time do we have Jessica a minute okay but I just want to show your most recent I can get yeah which was October 11th yes would you tell a little about it well as you might know there was a peace process going on in Colombia and and there was a referendum and and people rejected by a small margin but anyway rejected the peace the peace agreement the peace agreement has been an extraordinary work carefully they're owned by a really great group of people really intelligent sophisticated devoted group of people how to spend five years in Cuba writing this document and this document was was not only a peace agreement with the FARC but it was the first time in my lifetime at least that I see the possibility of the of the country transitioning into a better place into a better country it was that possibility because he had many aspects that were important like an agrarian reform way of dealing with drug trafficking elements that were absolutely essential to become unlivable feasible country when he was rejected I I fell in mourning and I had as I have said before I had done acts of mourning streets of Bogota and when Jordan Ellis was killed when a politician was killed one but but this was the most painful morning I have ever felt and so I decided to invite I can open invitation for people to sue morrow friends here the title is Amanda saying yes I cannot translate it but it's something like adding up the absent ones or something like that so the names of only 9% of the victims of the past 52 years of war were written on ashes and I decided to use ashes because they we know whether the names were going to be erased or maybe something could come out of the ashes I was ambiguous and and then people were teaching like 11 kilometers of his speeches there were seven kilometers of fabric and it was wonderful to the spouses people came to this this day and make this image possible so this this this square is a really active public political space where people go there to vent all sorts of grievances union leaders go there all sort of political groups go there to demonstrate so it was generals act of the living to move away and give this place give the very political center of Columbia to the to the people who had been killed and since they cannot come by themselves we brought them the living brought this presences this absence into they became present in this in this space and for just 12 hours we're just full hours yes I think that's a note to end our evening with the hope of peace and all that you both have shared about work that makes us all stop and think and feel at a moment in time that so many places in the world need us to think and mourn and be aware of what's happening and I cannot begin to thank you both for sharing so much with all of us and part of this

Channel: Harvard Art Museums

Views: 8,570

Rating: 4.9238095 out of 5

Keywords: harvard art museums, doris salcedo, materiality of mourning, mary schneider enriquez, elaine scarry, a flor de piel, sculpture, art, poltical violence, political art, mourning, materiality

Id: yFe5oRC4Dms

Length: 74min 5sec (4445 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 21 2016

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VIDEO	COMMENT
Lecture – Shadows of the Absent Body with Judith Butler	+1 - Lecture – Shadows of the Absent Body with Judith Butler
Lecture – Topography of Loss: A Symposium on Doris Salcedo (Part 1)	+1 - Lecture – Topography of Loss: A Symposium on Doris Salcedo (Part 1
Lecture – Topography of Loss: A Symposium on Doris Salcedo (Part 2)	+1 - Lecture – Topography of Loss: A Symposium on Doris Salcedo (Part 2
Lecture – Topography of Loss: A Symposium on Doris Salcedo (Part 3)	+1 - Lecture – Topography of Loss: A Symposium on Doris Salcedo (Part 3)
Lecture – Topography of Loss: A Symposium on Doris Salcedo (Part 4)	+1 - Lecture – Topography of Loss: A Symposium on Doris Salcedo (Part 4
Lecture – Doris Salcedo’s Circles of Sorrow, with Edwidge Danticat	+1 - Lecture – Doris Salcedo’s Circles of Sorrow, with Edwidge Danticat
Lecture – Ephemeral Yet Enduring: Challenges in Contemporary Conservation	+1 - Lecture – Ephemeral Yet Enduring: Challenges in Contemporary Conservation

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Lecture – Shadows of the Absent Body with Judith Butler

[u/ExteriorFlux]

Lecture – Topography of Loss: A Symposium on Doris Salcedo (Part 1

[u/ExteriorFlux]

Lecture – Doris Salcedo’s Circles of Sorrow, with Edwidge Danticat

[u/ExteriorFlux]

Lecture – Ephemeral Yet Enduring: Challenges in Contemporary Conservation