Doris Salcedo gave this lecture in 2003 at the National Museum in Colombia. She discusses three of the projects she presented in the1990s in Colombia, Holland, Turkey, and Germany: Atrabiliarios [Defiant] (2), Un acto de memoria [An Act of Memory], and Istanbul Project. This document lists the theses, authors, and rationales that the artist used to develop her international perspective via concepts such as: memory and history, violence, pain in the public space, reclaiming representation, society and the individual, and public art and the group experience. Inspired by the theories of the German poet Paul Celan and the Lithuanian philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, Salcedo thinks art should “make sense of the incomprehensible, which is the origin of what we define as the essence of humanity,” because art has the ability to express “languages of silence” which can re-establish communication in the wake of conflict. Salcedo therefore conceives her works of art as “local” events because they respond to the unity of and the crises affecting the particular place where they are installed. Finally, Salcedo claims that a work of art is never “linked to a logical unfolding of cause and effect,” but evokes the sensibility and ethic that “bear witness to life.”

This lecture is important because it is one of the first documents (written and read by Doris Salcedo) to discuss the origins of her artistic approach; and because it identifies the source of the poetic and theoretical influences on her work: Paul Celan (1920–1970), Emmanuel Levinas (1906–1995), Jacques Derrida (1930–2004), Michel Foucault (1926–1984), and Franz Rosenzweig (1886–1929). It also includes the main thesis of her work, which is the link between the metaphorical representation of her sculpture and the violence that she experiences as part of daily life in Colombia, drawing on the public’s collective memory to create her work.

The Colombian sculptor Doris Salcedo (b. 1958) sees her work as a metaphorical observation of events that happen in the public space and challenge the public’s ability to remember. She believes that “as a sculptor (…) I try—in vain, I want to stress ‘in vain’—to record acts of brutality and make sense of them. My job is to observe the violent, unstable, and erratic reality we live in” and try to make it intelligible by constructing images that question the “collective knowledge of the past.”

In the late 1980s Salcedo was acknowledged at the Salón Nacional de Artistas. Ever since then her sculpture has been inspired by the violence in Colombia, and she is known for works such as Atrabiliarios [Defiant] (1992), La Casa Viuda [The Widow’s House] (1992–1995), the Unland series (1997), Acto de Memoria [Act of Memory] (2002), and Istanbul Project (2002). Her work has been shown at the Tate Gallery in London, the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, and the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid; she also took part in the Eighth Istanbul Art Biennial (2003) and the Eleventh Documenta in Kassel (2002).