2 November/3 November 2019 ★ FT Weekend 5
Collecting
From top:
Doris Salcedo
in Bogotá;
‘Shibboleth’ in
Tate Modern’s
Turbine Hall,
2007; Salcedo
receiving
weapons from
General Álvaro
Pico; a view of
Fragmentos
Daniel Mordzinski; David
Levene/Eyevine; Juan
Fernando Castro/Fragmentos
PhotoholicD
oris Salcedo will be feeling
like a million dollars this
weekend.
That’s the amount the
Colombian sculptor walked
away with as the inaugural winner of the
Nomura Art Award, announced at a gala
dinner in Shanghai on Thursday night.
It is the largest cash prize in contempo-
rary visual arts nd is given “to supporta
an ambitious new project that the win-
ner did not previously have the means
to realise”.
Salcedo has already decided what that
project will be. She has been researching
a future work of art in Cúcuta, a city on
the Colombian-Venezuelan border that
witnessed some of the worst atrocities of
Colombia’s long civil conflict. “Because
of this award, I am now able to move
ahead much more quickly than I had
expected,” Salcedo says.
The Nomura award is not only a
springboard for future work. It is also a
recognition ofSalcedo’s oeuvre to date.
No other artist has delved so deter-
minedly into Colombia’s dark past,
drawing out tragic stories from a con-
flict that claimed more than a quarter of
a million lives. No other artist has placed
victims of that conflict centre-stage
quite likeSalcedo. And no other artist
from Colombia has crossed the Atlantic,
as she has, to give voice to the African
and Middle Eastern migrants who have
died crossing the Mediterranean.
“I am absolutely a political artist,” she
says defiantly. “I believe in art that
reacts with reality and society.”
For a British public,Salcedo first came
to prominence in 2007 when she per-
suaded Tate Modern to let her cut a
giant crack in the floor of the Turbine
Hall. The work, entitled “Shibboleth”,
was her commentary on “migration,
racism, division and polarisation”. Here
was an artist from the developing world
“subtly subverting the Turbine Hall’s
claims to monumentality and gran-
deur”,Tate Modern acknowledged. She
questioned “the shaky ideological foun-
dations on which western notions of
modernity are built”.
She followed up with “Palimpsest”,
arguably her most technically ambi-
tious work and one which took five
years. On scores of giant stone floor
slabs, she engraved the names of
migrants who had died trying to reach
Europe. As the viewer watched, drop-
lets of water emerged from the names,
as if the earth were weeping them. The
water then trickled away, in a constant
cycle of inscription and erasure.
Recently, the 61-year-old has re-
engaged with Colombia, where she lived
for most of the conflict. Raised in
Bogotá, she was largely immune to the
brutal war that ripped through rural
communities but, even so, could not
escape it entirely. Three members of her
husband’s family were kidnapped
during those dark years.
Salcedo’s principal response to the
conflict is Fragmentos, which is both a
work of art and an exhibition space in
the heart of Bogotá. It was born out of
the peace deal signed in 2016 betweenDoris Salcedo| W inner of a
$1m prize, the Colombian
sculptor talks toGideon Long
in Bogotá about her enduring
commitment to political art
the government and South America’s
oldest and largest leftwing guerrilla
group, the Revolutionary Armed Forces
of Colombia, or Farc. The deal stipu-
lated that three monuments would be
made from the Farc’s decommissioned
weapons, one in Havana where it was
signed, one outside UN headquarters in
New York and one in Colombia.
The government askedSalcedo to
work on the Colombian monument but
at first she refused. “I didn’t want to deal
with guns,” she says.
But then she reconsidered. She was
worried that someone else would use
the guns to construct a monument glori-
fying war. So she accepted the commis-
sion on the understanding she could
build “a counter-monument”, inspired
in part by the writings of US academic
James E Young and his rethinking of
Holocaust memorials, and of Austrian
art historian Mechtild Widrich, who has
developed the idea of “performative
monuments”.Salcedo took 37 tonnes of Farc weap-
ons and melted them down. She then
brought together Colombian women
who were sexually abused during the
conflict andasked them to beat sheets of
aluminium into moulds which she used
to make floor tiles from the molten
weapons. The tiles now cover the floor
of Fragmentos, an otherwise white cube
art space in the city centre.
It was a daunting project. “The Farc
didn’t like the idea that people would
walk over their weapons, which were an
important part of their identity,”
Salcedo says. “They saw it as a humilia-
tion.” She also had to persuade the
Colombian army to back the project, “as
they were the only ones who had a foun-
dry with temperatures high enough to
melt the guns.” Many members of the
army opposed the peace deal and
wanted nothing to do with a project
involving Farc.
“The weapons were in sealed contain-
ers and could only be opened in the
presence of police generals,” Salcedo
recalls. “Everything had to be recorded.
My studio had police surveillance 24/7.”
For the sculptor, the participation of
the female victims was key. “These were
women who, because of their experi-
ences, were not quite present. They
walked softly, they spoke with low
voices and when they started to ham-
mer they did it tentatively,” she says.
“But they grew in confidence until they
were hammering like crazy. It was
cathartic. It was if this action gave them
back their strength.”
In recent months, Fragmentos has
evolved from counter-monument to
exhibition centre. Two Colombians,
Clemencia Echeverri and Felipe Arturo,
have become the first artists to display
their work there.
When I meet up with Salcedo at her
studio in Bogotá, I ask her how she felt
about these artists invading her space.
“I love it!” she says, a broad smile break-
ing through her otherwise intense per-
sona. “I’ve managed to erase myself.
When you walk in to the cheverri exhi-E
bition my work disappears and I love
that. I had some say in choosing the first
artists to exhibit at Fragmentos but I’veHammering like crazy
since been kicked off the jury, and I’m
very happy about that. From now it’s up
to the curators to decide.”
Meanwhile,Salcedo continues to
work on the theme of violence in Colom-
bia. In June, she gathered hundreds of
volunteers in Bogotá’s main square,
Plaza Bolívar, to spell out the names of
murdered social leaders in shards of
broken glass. Like many of her works, it
was conceived on an industrial scale,
covering the square, but was at the same
time ephemeral, like the watery names
of “Palimpsest”. The work filled thecobbled square for a daythen was gone.
Such art is expensive to create, un-
collectable and defiantly non-commer-
cial, meaning prizes like those offered
by Nomura are essential. “I struggled
economically for years. I’ve been bank-
rupt many times,”Salcedo says.
Now, armed with her $1m bounty,
she wants to return to Cúcuta, where
rightwing paramilitaries committed
horrendous atrocities two decades ago.
As always before she begins a work,Sal-
cedo painstakingly interviews survivors
and witnessesto inform her vision.“The victims are the only reason I get
up in the morning,” she says, warning of
“the danger of oblivion” in which the
stories of ordinary people caught up in
the conflict are forgotten. “Without
memory we would be nothing.
“My head is in Cúcuta right now and
the terrible events that took place
there,” she says, as our conversation
draws to a close and the light starts to
fade outside her Bogotá studio. “They’re
the worst stories I have come across in
my life. It’s a horror that has not been
told. I need to make a piece there.”‘I am absolutely a political
artist,’ she says defiantly.
‘I believe in art that reactswith reality and society’
NOVEMBER 2 2019 Section:Weekend Time: 30/10/2019- 18:39 User:keith.allen Page Name:CNV5, Part,Page,Edition:CNV, 5, 1