Doris Salcedo

This work by Colombian artist Doris Salcedo is one of her first pieces and was exhibited for the first time at the Garcés Velázquez gallery in Bogotá. The work consists of a series of metal structures used as supports for cradles and cots from hospitals. Salcedo wraps them with natural fibres giving the appearance that they may contain some other objects inside and that they have been repaired after previous damage. Alongside these structures Salcedo impaled a series of white shirts, stiffened with plaster, onto eleven metal bars. This installation is one of the first works of the artist that takes on so-called “actions of mourning” that she would continue to incorporate into her work throughout her career from this point onwards. The artwork responds to the massacres that took place on the banana plantations of Honduras and La Negra. The artist says that in these massacres “the 

farmers were taken from their beds and assassinated on their doorsteps, in front of their families”. The artwork uses a strategy to emotionally move the spectator by alluding to the presence of the human body without explicitly showing it. The shirts refer as much to the uniform worn by the workers on these plantations as to the funeral attire of those that lost their lives. Stacked in varying quantities, the shirts also become a way of measuring human lives.