Atrabiliarios, 1993

In line with the denunciation of social violence that her country of origin has suffered for years, but without giving up the poetic gesture, in 1993 the Colombian artist Doris Salcedo made Atrabiliarios. In this three-part work, the sculptor, interested in making visible the different forms of death and silence, rescues from oblivion objects that are full of meaning, such as shoes. In this case, she has recovered the shoes she received from relatives of women who had disappeared in different rural areas of Colombia. For Salcedo, art is closely linked to tragedy. While the title of the series itself denotes an intemperate and violent personality, in these three pieces the artist adjudicates this adjective to the act of violence to which these women were subjected. The shoes, which retain the physical imprint of the person who used them, are ‘hidden’ or ‘silenced’ inside a box, in a clear metaphor for the lives of their owners.