Untitled, 2008

One of Doris Salcedo’s first series of works, created in the late 1980s and entitled Atrabiliarios (Defiant), emerges from the experience of people who have disappeared, where everything is impregnated with a feeling of loss and, as the artist has said, absence becomes more physical and pervasive than their past presence. Shoes, worn out by use, curve over the space left by the body that has ceased to wear them. Salcedo wraps them in a cocoon of animal skin, sewn with surgical thread, which takes on the amber color of aged membranes seen in museums of ethnography and natural science. They are deserted and closed off spaces, which preserve a void dense with desperate nostalgia. [...]