feAture DORIS SALCEDO
left: Noviembre 6 y 7, 2003, Bogotá
facing page: Installation for the 8th International Istanbul Biennial, 2004.
Photo: Muammer Yanmaz
What is our
reaction
to the human
distress our fear
engenders?
power. But for the artist the piece had far more cogent connections to
current realities. Prior to creating it, Salcedo had been researching white
slavery and had read the story of a fourteen-year-old girl lured from
Eastern Europe to Turin by the promise of marriage from a twenty-
six-year-old Italian. When she arrived in Italy, he sold her to a brothel.
Forced to take as many as 30 men a day, she was often escorted by
thugs to private parties. At one of these she determined to escape by
jumping out of a window. Falling three storeys to the street, she broke
her neck. “This is the kind of optimism, the kind of escape I want to be
possible [from that room],” Salcedo explained at the opening of T1.
Understood in this context, Abyss initiates a discussion about
the social and philosophical space the West allows the non-Western
immigrant. On the crudest level, the foreigner is objectified to the point
of becoming a nonhuman. Source of sexual pleasure and empowerment
As elucidated in her work, this exercise of power, and by extension for her abusers, the sex slave Salcedo mentioned was denied the very
our underlying values, involve exchanges of profound inequality satisfaction derived from her: her humanity was in essence cancelled by
predicated on an insidious and inherent racism. This presumption of what she was forced to provide to others.
superiority is expressed in gender bias, political violence, exclusionary In the same way, Abyss united the positive and its aberration.
immigration policies and globalised economic exploitation. Even A structure which is meant to enclose and shelter became a prison. A
Salcedo’s work concerning violence in her native Colombia reflects ceiling which is meant to cover, entombed. Here the room’s function
these dynamics, albeit in a highly subtle and multivalent manner, and during the Savoy era becomes germane, for it is used by Salcedo to
they were strongly developed in her last two major installations, Abyss suggest that a historical and cultural continuity exists between the
(2005) and Neither (2004). political and social repression effected by an oligarchy and the situation
For Abyss, realised for T1, the first Turin Triennial, Salcedo of the immigrant in contemporary Italy.
constructed massive walls of roughly fired brick that appeared to The dynamic of objectification that allows those in authority to
extend the dome of a former reception room in the Castello di Rivoli imprison and denigrate others underlay Salcedo’s monumental Neither.
to the floor. Only a narrow, uneven reveal at the bottom relieved the Made from plasterboard into which she had forced metal fencing, the
walls’ massiveness and allowed light to enter the room from the now piece was designed to fit as a second skin just within the London gallery
blocked French windows behind them. At once vast and unified, White Cube. There the pattern of cyclone fencing appeared as small
yet nearly entombed, the room induced a sense of enormous networks of cracks and crimps, as hints of geometry within the walls,
expanse and intense claustrophobia. Daylight glinting from behind the not meant to keep one in or out, but surrounding the viewer with an
encumbering structure suggested the possibility of exit. But hinting unknown presence. Subsumed into the very structure of the gallery, the
at the outside world, unenclosed and unconfined, also reinforced an fencing both emphasised and compromised it; the work became, then,
intense sense of isolation. about surface, enclosure and protection.
In the context of the Castello di Rivoli, a former country retreat “What is it to be in a concentration camp?” Salcedo asked,
for the Savoy dynasty, rulers of the Piedmont region and of Italy after during a discussion in Bogotá, while she was working on the piece.
its unification, the room in which Abyss was installed can be read as the “What is it to lose one’s freedom? This is everywhere: in the camps in
public face of an oligarchic order, a place of exchange in which people Australia and Nauru, where asylum seekers are held; in Guantánamo;
of lesser political and social status were allowed to approach political for those awaiting deportation from the United States.”
Artreview 60
Salcedo.indd 4 7/9/07 10:29:13
Page 1  |  Page 2  |  Page 3  |  Page 4  |  Page 5  |  Page 6  |  Page 7  |  Page 8  |  Page 9  |  Page 10  |  Page 11  |  Page 12  |  Page 13  |  Page 14  |  Page 15  |  Page 16  |  Page 17  |  Page 18  |  Page 19  |  Page 20  |  Page 21  |  Page 22  |  Page 23  |  Page 24  |  Page 25  |  Page 26  |  Page 27  |  Page 28  |  Page 29  |  Page 30  |  Page 31  |  Page 32  |  Page 33  |  Page 34  |  Page 35  |  Page 36  |  Page 37  |  Page 38  |  Page 39  |  Page 40  |  Page 41  |  Page 42  |  Page 43  |  Page 44  |  Page 45  |  Page 46  |  Page 47  |  Page 48  |  Page 49  |  Page 50  |  Page 51  |  Page 52  |  Page 53  |  Page 54  |  Page 55  |  Page 56  |  Page 57  |  Page 58  |  Page 59  |  Page 60  |  Page 61  |  Page 62  |  Page 63  |  Page 64  |  Page 65  |  Page 66  |  Page 67  |  Page 68  |  Page 69  |  Page 70  |  Page 71  |  Page 72  |  Page 73  |  Page 74  |  Page 75  |  Page 76  |  Page 77  |  Page 78  |  Page 79  |  Page 80  |  Page 81  |  Page 82  |  Page 83  |  Page 84  |  Page 85  |  Page 86  |  Page 87  |  Page 88  |  Page 89  |  Page 90  |  Page 91  |  Page 92  |  Page 93  |  Page 94  |  Page 95  |  Page 96  |  Page 97  |  Page 98  |  Page 99  |  Page 100  |  Page 101  |  Page 102  |  Page 103  |  Page 104  |  Page 105  |  Page 106  |  Page 107  |  Page 108  |  Page 109  |  Page 110  |  Page 111  |  Page 112  |  Page 113  |  Page 114  |  Page 115  |  Page 116  |  Page 117  |  Page 118  |  Page 119  |  Page 120  |  Page 121  |  Page 122  |  Page 123  |  Page 124  |  Page 125  |  Page 126  |  Page 127  |  Page 128  |  Page 129  |  Page 130  |  Page 131  |  Page 132  |  Page 133  |  Page 134  |  Page 135  |  Page 136  |  Page 137  |  Page 138  |  Page 139  |  Page 140  |  Page 141  |  Page 142  |  Page 143  |  Page 144  |  Page 145  |  Page 146  |  Page 147  |  Page 148  |  Page 149  |  Page 150  |  Page 151  |  Page 152  |  Page 153  |  Page 154  |  Page 155  |  Page 156  |  Page 157  |  Page 158  |  Page 159  |  Page 160  |  Page 161  |  Page 162  |  Page 163  |  Page 164  |  Page 165  |  Page 166  |  Page 167  |  Page 168  |  Page 169  |  Page 170  |  Page 171  |  Page 172  |  Page 173  |  Page 174  |  Page 175  |  Page 176  |  Page 177  |  Page 178  |  Page 179  |  Page 180  |  Page 181  |  Page 182