FEATURE DORIS SALCEDO
this page: Abyss, 2005
facing page: Acción de Duelo, 2007, Bogotá
Such examples, however, do not constitute simple cases which Europeans destroyed indigenous civilisations and then imposed
of incarceration. Guantánamo, for instance, serves as a place of a foreign culture from which native peoples and imported slaves
confinement for individuals classified by the Bush administration as were barred by virtue of ethnicity and poverty. This history has left
threats to the nation. Denied legal recourse, they are quarantined Colombians with the ironic conundrum of constructing a society
for no reason other than presidential fiat, by means that belie the from a colonial legacy and an indigenous identity which that legacy
democratic rule of law their isolation is meant to protect. It becomes rejects. Indeed, civil violence there derives from a nineteenth-century
the prerogative of Western power to identify the foreigner as an conflict between a conservative faction that believed that the nation’s
agent of contagion and to select who is subject to and who denied the identity lay in its Spanish heritage and a socially progressive one which
freedoms we believe are ours. argued that the new country must be as non-European as is its flora
Similarly, during last summer’s debates concerning immigration and fauna.
reform in the US, critics of efforts to regularise the status of long- This schism has been exacerbated by a persistent social and
resident illegal aliens objected to what they categorised as a reward economic divide between an upper class of European descent and
for lawbreaking. Such a stance presumed that the majority of a middle and lower class comprising mestizos, Indians and Africans.
undocumented foreigners were not hardworking participants in the Enriched by the most concentrated landholdings in the world,
US economy but impoverished freeloaders taking advantage of our members of the elite have been burning peasants off their farms since
prosperity (aside from the more racist anti-Mexican cant spewed the 1930s in efforts to preserve their privilege. Right-wing paramilitaries,
against them). As the antithesis of the values we establish for ourselves, which control vast rural territories, operate in concert with these vested
they must be purged from the body politic to preserve it. interests, often with support from government and ecclesiastical
In Neither, as in Abyss, Salcedo sublimated any such direct officials. Reduced to its simplest outline, the result is an atomised society
critique into a subtle, multivalent piece which asked what the reality in which a wealthy elite, with access to the international economy,
might be not only of those who are kept out, but also for us who keep dominates a disenfranchised, impoverished majority.
them out. The walls of our homes are meant to keep us comfortable Colombia is thus the template for the results of a long-standing
and cosy, but are they in fact fences put up to protect us from those pattern by which European culture bars all that is different and rejects
we fear? Have we, in developed countries, erected barriers around our it as inferior; indeed, worthy of dismissal and disposal. How these
affluent societies to protect our privilege? What then is our reaction ideas play out specifically in Salcedo’s installation in the Turbine Hall
to and culpability for the economic, political and human distress our is the subject for discussion after its unveiling. Given the past thematic
indulgence and fear engender? continuities and developments in her work, however, they should
During our discussion in Bogotá, Salcedo commented that constitute a primer for its understanding.
“the work always begins here”. Her identity as a Colombian is critical
to any understanding of racism and the dynamics of European cultural The Unilever Series: Doris Salcedo is on view in the Tate Modern Turbine
exclusion. Colombian society is predicated on a colonial history in Hall, London, 9 October – 6 April
six.linthree.lin ARTREVIEW
Salcedo.indd 7 10/9/07 13:35:11
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