A Matrixial Reading of Doris Salcedo's Work

• In Event: Art, Gender and Violence in Colombia

Abstract

Political activist culture in Latin America has often taken a direct approach to communicate an urgent message. Activists have regularly used genres such as photojournalism and testimonio to reach out to a wide audience in order to denounce crimes against humanity. Cultural production that responds to political violence often manifests an indexical impulse to document atrocities. There are, however, works in which there is a manifestation of the maternal that gives the viewers access to the sense of traumatic loss resulting from political violence that eschews direct indexical reference. This article will examine two exhibits by Colombian sculptor Doris Salcedo (Untitled and Unland) as examples of political art in which there is a non-indexical “maternal” approach to the trauma of others: emphasizing a haptic sense in which the tactile experience informs sight, Salcedo communicates to the viewers the immense loss caused by violence and the need to mourn this loss, without an explicit representation of violent events. Although my analysis focuses on these specific works, the aim of this article is to provide an understanding of the potential of non-indexical political art by women and by those who can access forms of witnessing that approach what Bracha Ettinger calls the matrixial.

Author

• Margarita Saona, University of Illinois at Chicago