collective memory and consciousness

Unland: audible in the mouth 1998
Wood, thread, hair
800 X 750 X 3150mm
Doris Salcedo

Over a period of three years, Salcedo traveled to the northern heartland of Colombia’s civil war and spoke to children who had witnessed the murder of their parents. These testimonies inspired a series of three sculptures given the collective title Unland. Conjoining two fragmented tables, this work suggests the dysfunction caused by extreme trauma. "We spend our life around tables and their familiarity helps to draw you in", Salcedo has said. "Yet these objects have been forcibly united... and appear to be like the mutated remains of an accident".


While Salcedo's sculptures are concerned with the victims of violence in her own country, they are not bound by this frame of reference. In a much wider sense they deal with the life of anyone who has been bereaved and the manner in which those individual experiences can be conveyed and understood by others. At the same time, she is preoccupied by the formal language of sculpture and its material presence for the viewer.

Unland: the orphans tunic (detail) 1998
Wood, hair, woven cloth
Doris Salcedo

Salcedo addresses the question of forgetting and memory, taking ordinary household items and transforming them into memorials. The seemingly mundane table when considered closely, captures the viewer’s imagination in its unexpected, haunting visual and material presence. An everyday piece of furniture is in fact made of two destroyed tables joined together and covered with a whitish veil of fabric, presumably the orphan’s original tunic. Upon even closer inspection, hundreds of small human hairs appear to be the thread that is attaching the tunic to the table. The structure of the table can be equated to the body. If the tunic is like a skin then the table gains a metaphoric presence as body, not now of an individual orphan but an orphaned community. Salcedo’s Unland is a memory sculpture, presenting the past of her own country of Colombia to the international art audience.

“The way that an artwork brings materials together is incredibly powerful. Sculpture is its materiality. I work with materials that are already charged with significance, with meaning they have required in the practice of everyday life…then, I work to the point where it becomes something else, where metamorphosis is reached.” DS 

“The silent contemplation of each viewer permits the life seen in the work to reappear. Change takes place, as if the experience of the victim were reaching out…The sculpture presents the experience as something present- a reality that resounds within the silence of each human being that gazes upon it.” DS

Salcedo employs objects from the past, objects imbued with an important sense of history and, through these contemporary memory sculptures, illustrates the flow of time. She joins the past and the present, repairs what she sees as incomplete and, in the eyes of Andreas Huyssen, presents “memory at the edge of an abyss…memory in the literal sense…and memory as process .”


http://www.tate.org.uk/research/tateresearch/tatepapers/04spring/unland_paper.htm