Why Matter Matters Doris Salcedo’s Material Memorial Movements

Traumatic heritage sites must be both preserved and questioned; maintained and critically assessed, through the simple but key question: what happened? Knowledge of the past must be improved and generate the creative imagination of new social subjectivities. Colombian artist-sculptor Doris Salcedo is one of the most prominent contributors to that knowledge-building. She demonstrates how art can help overcoming trauma, and restore the broken social bond. Starting with her most recent work, Uprooted (2022), this chapter examines how she does that. In that endeavor, materiality is a major issue. Consisting of dead trees, Uprooted integrates the environmental crisis and the refugee crisis. This integration “explains” how the world and its inhabitants must collaborate through empathy to make life livable again. Not only for the traumatized victims of past violence but for today. A few earlier works will be (re-)visited, since Salcedo has devoted her entire career to the need to remember, the building of material memorials, and to invoking empathy in the visitors. She achieves this through in-depth experiments with the fine lines between the categories we tend to count on. Her installation Palimpsesto (2017), for example, challenges the distinction between still and moving images, and for visitors, to find yourself between inside and outside, participant and viewer. With the help of the concept of cultural memory, it becomes possible to grasp the profound meanings that bring matter and thought together.