We find the front everywhere: grievability and the proximity of social and anonymous death in Doris Salcedo’s “Plegaria Muda”

ABSTRACT

In Plegaria Muda (2008, ‘silent prayer’), Colombian sculptor, Doris Salcedo amassed 166 elongated tables. Stacked in pairs with soil in-between, the sheer number evokes a mass grave. However, here, the installation impedes free movement through the exhibition space. Viewers are left without the capacity to ignore the work’s presence. Salcedo was influenced by violence in Los Angeles where the war on drugs disproportionately affected African Americans and Latinos. Concurrently in Colombia, the ‘false positives’ controversy where the Colombian state compensated the Army for “guerrilla deaths,” or more accurately the extrajudicial killings of poor civilians. Here, I aim to historicise Plegaria Muda. Attending to these histories of state violence demonstrates precisely how Salcedo’s works suggest that distance cannot easily be placed between the United States with its presupposed moral authority and events elsewhere in the world. Namely, proximity in Salcedo’s works challenge a defensive estrangement the global north might put in place against violence in the global south. In Plegaria Muda, Salcedo connected the social death of marginalised neighbourhoods in Los Angeles A with the anonymous and invisible death of Colombia’s marginalised poor. Salcedo’s installation asks viewers to examine which bodies are, in Judith Butler’s terms, ‘ungrievable’ from the start.

KEYWORDS:

• Doris Salcedo
• Plegaria Muda
• social death
• phenomenology
• Colombia
• Los Angeles
• visual art

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. This paper does not seek to address whether it is possible to possess empathy for another. But it does follow the argument that even the mere possibility of empathy is already foreclosed in the cases described above.

2. Murch found that a defining characteristic of the Reagan-Bush era war on drugs was the slippage between drug trafficking, gangs, terrorism, and organised crime.

3. I do not think that Salcedo was attuned to all of the dynamics outlined above. And in fact, some of her rhetoric repeats some of the biases against gang members I have attempted to outline. However, it is crucial to note that Salcedo does strongly maintain that such individuals must be mourned.

4. Uribe was elected in 2002 on a hard-line conservative platform of increasing the number of military members and arming civilians (Dugas, 2003, p. 1124; Forero, 2001). There was already concern over his ‘strongman tactics’ and fear that it would promote paramilitary violence. Uribe was known to have supported CONVIVIRs or armed civilian self-defence groups. By 1998, Human Rights Watch showed these groups had committed their own human rights violations. Uribe was soon to grant amnesty to paramilitaries (with whom he, as well as the state security forces had ties to) yet avoided substantial reintegration programs.

5. During the period of 2007–2009, when the most visible forms of violence, including massacres decreased, forced disappearances increased. The Centro Nacional de Memoria Histórica found that the shift in strategy maintained paramilitary territorial control while reducing visibility and thus public outcry. For further discussion of U.S. involvement in the Colombian cold war context and following, see DiSarno (2021).

6. This is not to say that the two scenarios should be conflated on all accounts. Each are unique circumstances.

7. Plegaria Muda was exhibited around the world and was included in Salcedo’s major retrospectives in the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago and the Guggenheim Museum among other locations.

8. As these works refract a viewer’s own positioning back to them, they come closer Kelley et al. (2019) conception of solidarity over empathy. Whereas, he argues, empathy hinges on identifying with those who are recognisable as oneself or who we might see ourselves in, solidarity requires a ‘stepping outside of ourselves’ towards understanding positions unlike our own (Kelley et al., 2019, p. 582).

9. For further discussion on grievability and visibility see DiSarno (2021).

10. As I argue elsewhere, few nuanced historical accounts of Salcedo’s work exist at all. Reyes (2021) recent publication is unique in this manner. See also Aerne (2016). Schneider-Enriquez (2016) does include historical context. However, her account displays significant biases towards certain actors and tends to follow the dominant perspective of the US: that leftist guerrillas are the most significant threat. Schneider-Enriquez states that paramilitaries are state sanctioned but fails to note they are also responsible for 80% of human rights violations. Likewise, the author also fails to implicate the role of the US in aiding the Colombian state and the state’s connection to paramilitaries. To my knowledge, no author has carefully examined the topic of violence in Los Angeles in relation to this work. Andreas Huyssen’s recent book (Huyssen, 2022) does include mention of paramilitary and military violence, forced displacement, and dispossession of land but does not contextualise further. Yet he also resorts to typecasting decontextualised categorisations such as ‘the decades-long festering civil war in Colombia’ (p. 61).

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Jamie DiSarno

Jamie DiSarno earned a PhD in Visual Studies from the University of Buffalo in 2020 with her dissertation entitled, “Controlling the Global Turn in Art History: Doris Salcedo as Understood in the Global North” She received a Bachelors of Fine Arts in painting and sculpture from the State University of New York at Fredonia in 2005 and a Masters of Fine Arts in New Media from the Pennsylvania State University in 2010. Dr. DiSarno presented her research at numerous national and international conferences, including the College Art Association Conference, the Latin American Studies Association Congress, amongst many others. Her article, “Containment in Doris Salcedo’s Atrabiliarios” was published by Third Text in 2021. She published in Wanderlust: A History of Walking by the MIT Press and edited by Rachel Adams. She taught at the Rochester Institute of Technology, the University at Buffalo, Pennsylvania State University, and currently teaches at the State University of New York, College at Fredonia.