Inside Doris Salcedo's Fragmentos memorial in Bogotá: a glass-walled corridor whose floor is made of her textured metal plates cast from melted-down weapons, with preserved ruins visible through the glass. Artist

Doris Salcedo

Religious Art & Worldviews · Artists

The Colombian sculptor of political violence's traces — her Fragmentos floor in Bogotá is a counter-monument hammered from surrendered weapons by women victims of the conflict.

Tagged: Sculpture Contemporary Commemorative Prophetic/Critical Counter-Monument Secular and Non-Theistic

Salcedo's work gives form to absence: furniture choked with concrete, a crack run through a museum floor, a square's worth of chairs lowered down a palace wall. She interviews victims and builds from their testimony, and the work refuses illustration.

The pictured Fragmentos (2018) floors a gallery with tiles cast from melted FARC weapons, their surfaces hammered by women who survived sexual violence in the war — a memorial meant to be walked on, in silence, above a void.

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