Doris Salcedo: Absence Made an 'Extremely Powerful Presence'

By Daniel Okafor

On October 15, Colombia's far-right president ordered dozens of objects removed from the Museo Nacional in Bogotá. A court reinstated them within two weeks. By then, hundreds had protested in the streets and faced police repression.

The order came from President Abelardo De la Espriella. It targeted artworks and materials tied to LGBTQ+ and feminist movements, the 2016 peace agreement with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), and the campaigns of left-wing leaders Carlos Pizarro and Bernardo Jaramillo Ossa. Both men were assassinated in the 1990s. De la Espriella has called them "terrorists."

Doris Salcedo has seen this film before. In 2021, her installation-space "Fragmentos" in Bogotá — an "anti-monument" to the end of the guerrilla war, its floor cast from melted-down FARC weapons shaped by women who suffered assault during the conflict — was usurped for political ends by conservative populist president Iván Duque. She spoke about the new moment ahead of presenting new works at White Cube gallery in New York on November 13.

Why did this scandal, of all of them, spark outrage?

Salcedo's verdict is blunt. "It's very difficult to live under an authoritarian government that moves very quickly," she told Hyperallergic. "In two months it has destroyed what Trump took two years to destroy."

She counts the paradox. Grave scandals have piled up without mobilizing Colombian society, yet the museum censorship did. "A series of extremely serious events has occurred, but society has not mobilized and has not raised its voice. In this case, it has," she said.

Her theory: Latin Americans recognize censorship when they see it. "I don't know if it's because of the history of repression we carry with us, because we've already lived through it," she said. "But the reaction has been beautiful, moving, strong."

Young professors from different universities took their classes to the museum's steps and taught in the street. Every day since October 15, people have gathered in front of the building. The government wanted silence. It got a school.

What does an emptied museum look like?

Here Salcedo turns formalist, and it suits her. The Museo Nacional, she notes, had been badly run for years — poor leadership, poor programming, "a somewhat lackluster museum." The censorship changed that.

"Seeing those square rectangles, those ghostly rectangles with a little dust, where the paintings have been removed ... those absences become an extremely powerful presence," she said.

The public answered in kind. People reproduced the removed paintings and objects and displayed the copies at the museum's door. "This act of censorship gave enormous fertility to the cultural world, which reacted in an intelligent and creative way," Salcedo said.

The framing is pure Salcedo. Her sculptures and site-specific public interventions have spent decades articulating the contours of absence — conjuring victims of political violence and disappearance not by looking back, but by shaping what's missing.

She closed with a reminder aimed squarely at those in power. "They know they are going to be portrayed," she said, "and that works of art last much longer than their governments."

The dust rectangles stay empty for now. The reproductions at the door suggest who's winning.