Visual Arts Library
Atrabiliarios (Detail)
Artist: Doris Salcedo
Date:
1992 - 1993
Medium: Wall installation with 10 niches and 11 boxes
Dimensions: 388.6 x 99 x 14.6 cm
Event: Latin American Repression
Motif:
Remembrance
Through her work, Doris Salcedo seeks to embody the social conscience of her native country Columbia, where the process of memory has been obscured by the constant and pervasive violence of everyday life. The artist focuses on victims from the rural regions of Columbia, traveling to interview survivors and creating works that play the role of perpetual witness to the events that have claimed so many. Her series Atrabiliarios, which means "defiant," features women's shoes alone or in pairs, placed in niches in walls and coverd by semi-translucent animal skin, attached to the wall with crude stitches. The shoes belonged to women who have "disappeared" and were given to the artist by the victims' families. The shoes, which are only partially visible behind the animal skin, echoes the state of the women to whom they once belonged, whose fate and whereabouts are still unknown. Aside from functioning as portraits of the "disappeared" the works in the series also speak to the grief and uncertainty faced by those who are left behind.
Credits: Courtesy of Alexander and Bonin, New York. Photo: Orcutt & Van Der Putten
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