A home for loss: Doris Salcedo’s melancholic archives

An ‘an-archival’ impulse

In the summer of 2003, Salcedo participated in the 8th International Istanbul Biennial with an untitled installation of 1550 chairs piled into an empty lot in a working-class residential-commercial neighbourhood of the city. This jumbled mass of modest wooden kitchen chairs, of varying shapes, sizes and degrees of wear and tear, was jammed tightly between two neighbouring buildings, reaching three stories high and somehow achieving a flush vertical surface that belied its seemingly haphazard instability. The installation was intended to reproduce what Salcedo (2007) calls a ‘topography of war’:

so deeply inscribed in everyday life that, in spite of the fact that it represents an extreme experience, the point where normal conditions of life end and war begins can no longer be clearly discerned. An image where the private and the political collide, producing a complete sense of disorientation [reflecting] the complex and difficult relations that emerge in contested spaces or sites of war. (p. 99)

To reveal the catastrophic consequences of the inevitable collision between the private and the public in times of war and upheaval has been an ongoing imperative in Salcedo’s work. Engaging with both first-hand and archival interviews with torture victims and relatives of the dead and ‘disappeared’ of Colombia’s so-called Dirty War as direct sources of inspiration for her work, it is the oblique nature of her practice that charges the work with richly associative affective dimensions. Salcedo works mainly with domestic furniture – sometimes worn and discarded, and sometimes manufactured to the artist’s specifications – that is fused awkwardly but painstakingly with materials as fragile as lace, silk thread and human hair, and as rigid (but equally redolent) as nails, concrete and human bones. The result is a series of installations, from 1984 to the present, that capture both the mutilating, dehumanising nature of political violence and the domestic, deeply intimate consequences of civil strife.

In Salcedo’s Istanbul installation, the catastrophic topographies of war are materialised with a profusion of disorienting collisions, both material and metaphorical. The chairs, to begin, appear caught in a frozen state of perpetual collision, producing an effect of sheer vertiginous tension that is only heightened by the unsettling juxtaposition of the orderly, flush, perfectly enclosed installation with the chaotic jumble of objects contained within. Like a meticulously assembled house of cards, the structure appears ready at any moment to collapse. Furthermore, there is a disorientation of our desire to shape meaning from this work. On one hand, it seems to offer a surfeit of detail: the installation, we are clearly informed, laments the chaotic, uncertain inhabitation of contested spaces – a lament that is invested with indexical detail by the chairs, each worn by use, each with a history of belonging, thus subtly transforming 1550 unique objects into 1550 traces of absent human presence. But this abundance of referentiality clashes with an undeniable dearth of information, leaving questions to hang as awkwardly as the chairs themselves. To what (or to whom) do these chairs bear witness? Are they stand-ins for lives lost to violence, or do they represent the domestic spaces left vacant by civilians fleeing war? Are we meant to infer a garbage heap of abandoned furnishings, a pile of personal belongings suggesting a pogrom or massacre, or perhaps an entire house demolished by aerial bombardment? There are no certain answers to these questions; not even a title is supplied to provide context – surprisingly, from an artist whose sculptures and installations frequently bear evocative, multilayered titles that add nuanced and complex associations. Here, the indexicality of the chairs is as frustratingly elusive as an untraceable footprint in the sand: each an anonymous relic of lives lived, together they point us toward a past that cannot be reconstituted with any certainty. As such, these chairs both reflect and challenge what Hal Foster has recently named an ‘archival impulse’ in contemporary art practice. But in order to better comprehend the significance of this challenge, it will be useful to first look briefly at how the archive has itself become a site of challenged authority in recent art and literature.

For the past 15 to 20 years, a diverse and international body of artists – including Walid Raad, Allan Sekula, Christian Boltanski and Tacita Dean – have been examining the archive’s fraught role as a keeper of collective knowledge. Inspired by theoretical re-assessments of the archive by philosophers such as Derrida and Foucault (but also Gayatri Spivak, Paul Ricoeur, Giorgio Agamben and Pierre Nora), these artists have themselves become the subject of art historical analysis for their capacity to dispute archival authority and address the suppression of marginalised histories therein, while reconfiguring the archive as a porous, dynamic, even ephemeral cultural institution. Perhaps the most robust analysis to date of the ‘archival impulse’ in contemporary art comes from art historian and theorist Hall Foster (2004), who argues that contemporary archival practices, which both manipulate and produce archives, work to underscore ‘the nature of all archival materials as found yet constructed, factual yet fictive, public yet private’ (p. 5). For Foster, these artists – who challenge both the parameters and the authority of the archive – assume a critical stance toward public archives that emerges from a shared sense of official cultural memory as a failed project. For instance, Swiss artist Thomas Hirschhorn’s monuments to philosophers Spinoza, Bataille and Deleuze are staged in marginalised urban spaces like the red-light district of Amsterdam and the North African quarter of Avignon in order to reevaluate both what is remembered and who is charged with the authority of remembering, and therefore temporarily transform the logic of the monument from a ‘univocal’ structure that conceals social and political antagonisms into a ‘counter-hegemonic archive’ where these antagonisms are offered space to unfold (Foster, 2004: 9).

Foster (2004) concludes that the production of alternative archives in the practices of artists like Hirschhorn and Dean is as much a utopian venture as a critical project, manifesting a collective desire ‘to recoup failed visions in art, literature, philosophy and everyday life into possible scenarios of alternative kinds of social relations’ (p. 22). The archival impulse, he suggests, produces ‘construction sites’ rather than ‘excavation sites’, and thus represents a shift awayfrom the more melancholic cultural practices of the 1990s, which, he agues, treated ‘the historical as little more than traumatic’ (2004: 22). Here, Foster is intimating a critique, fully elaborated in his 1996 book The Return of the Real, of what he regards as the problematic troping of trauma in contemporary art. In that earlier text, Foster (1996) argued that trauma has overwhelmed aesthetic practices that obsessively produce and reproduce the abject or obscene body (as in, for example, the anal fixations of the late Mike Kelley), manifesting little more than an embrace of the Lacanian real as respite from the disembodied discourses of deconstruction (p.166). Foster (1996) acknowledges that the ‘return of the real’ in contemporary art is also, in large part, fuelled by the ravaging effects of war, poverty, AIDS and other phenomena that have arguably conspired to render the twentieth century (and, thus far, the twenty-first), the age of trauma, but warns that when all experience is filtered through the language of trauma, the ‘politics of alterity’ devolves into the apolitical realm of nihility (p. 166).

However, in his resolve to welcome the ‘constructive’ element of contemporary art’s archival impulse as a reprieve from the ‘excavations’ of trauma discourse and culture, Foster glosses over the rich and potentially transformative effects of negotiating an archival aesthetics within the context of what Judith Butler (2003) calls ‘melancholic agency’ (p. 468). As Butler (2003) suggests,

Loss becomes condition and necessity for a certain sense of community, where community does not overcome the loss, where community cannot overcome the loss without losing the very sense of itself as community. And if we say this second truth about the place where belonging is possible, then pathos is not negated, but it turns out to be oddly fecund, paradoxically productive. (p. 468)

It is this understanding of loss as ‘condition and necessity for a certain sense of community’ that, I argue against Foster’s privileging of ‘construction sites’ over ‘excavation sites’, enables contemporary archival practices to exhibit a uniquely anarchival impulse, underwritten by the premise and the promise of melancholic agency. Employing precisely the language (and sometimes the practice) of excavation to re-imagine Foster’s proposal for ‘alternative kinds of social relations’, certain recent art practices activate what I would like to call melancholic archives. Charged with bearing witness to the injustices of the past and present, these practices reconceive the archive not just as a repository, but also as an open wound, in constant need of diligent attention – an archive that challenges its own affirmative mandate, instead recognising itself to be contingent, fragmented and ephemeral. In essence, the melancholic archive takes on the task that Michel Foucault (1984) assigns to heritage: not ‘an acquisition, a possession that grows and solidifies’, but instead ‘an unstable assemblage of faults, fissures, and heterogeneous layers that threaten the fragile inheritor from within or from underneath’ (p. 81).

The past decade has witnessed numerous works of art that align productively with the concept of melancholic archivisation. Emily Jacir’s installation Memorial to 418 Palestinian Villages Destroyed, Depopulated and Occupied by Israel in 1948 (2001) is, as its title suggests, an installation that both commemorates loss and preserves what remains of that loss with an exactingly detailed and painstakingly embroidered list of 418 place names onto the surface of a large United Nations refugee tent. A melancholically materialised home for loss, the work speaks both to the inaccessibility of a past that exists only in its traces, and to the home’s (or, in this case, the tent’s) fragile position as a repository for traces of the past. Afghani performance artist Lida Abdul likewise materialises loss through its traces in the 2003 performance video Housewheel or Things We Fail to Leave Behind, in which the artist walks and runs through the streets of inner-city Los Angeles dragging an increasingly battered doll-sized white plaster house behind her with a rope. A more recent example is Wafaa Bilal’s And Counting …, a 24-hour performance in 2010 during which the artist’s back was tattooed with 5000 red dots representing the deaths of American soldiers during the most recent war in Iraq, and with tens of thousands of green ultraviolet dots (invisible except under black light) to represent the 100,000 or more Iraqi victims of the war and occupation. In this unsettling work, the artist’s own body becomes a melancholic archive of sort – accommodating obscure traces of loss whose presence is only illuminated by darkness. Finally, in the practice of Doris Salcedo, melancholic archivisation becomes a process of re-assembling the faults and fissures of Foucaultian archaeology in order to bear witness to the material losses they trace. In Salcedo’s artworks (as in those of Jacir, Abdul and Bilal), the archive takes on the role of silent, incomplete and unstable witness to traumatic loss, whose existence nevertheless signals an insistent desire to house our memories, however imperfectly. For if ‘archive fever’, as Derrida (1996) suggests, is a sort of homesickness – an ‘irrepressible desire to return to the origin’ (p. 91) – then Doris Salcedo’s melancholic archives remind us that this home we seek cannot be sustained as a stable source of identification and attachment, instead articulating a relationship to home that is as contingent and heterogeneous as Foucault’s site of heritage and as utopian in its efforts to reinvigorate social relations as Hal Foster’s archival impulse.

Memory, home and the body

From early sculptural assemblages of domestic furniture to more recent large-scale works like the Istanbul installation, the motif of the wooden chair has surfaced repeatedly to facilitate a rich set of associations between memory, home and the human body as structures of inhabitation. As a familiar piece of domestic furniture that so often carries an element of personal belonging (I’m thinking here of my mother’s favourite sewing chair, or the seat to which I inevitably gravitate at dinnertime), as furniture that bears the wear of intimate human contact; and as an object whose design (back, seat, legs) seems even to mimic the human form, conforming to the shape of the body at rest and designed to accommodate human dimensions – the chair (and the empty chair especially) seems unparalleled in its uncanny capacity to evoke the human body. Indeed, so saturated is the chair with references to the body that it has become a fairly standard motif in memorial projects: in September 2011, 2753 chairs were installed on the lawn at New York City’s Bryank Park to mark the 10th anniversary of the World Trade Center disaster, while in Oklahoma City, 168 chairs have been permanently installed to remember victims of the 1995 bombing of the A.P. Murray Federal Building. In such spaces of mournful commemoration, as in Salcedo’s work, chairs occupy a three-fold purpose of rendering the absent body a palpable presence – as metonym, index and symbolic reference.

What differentiates Salcedo’s practice is that her spaces are not only uncanny, ‘unhomely’ even, but indeed uninhabitable. Unlike the Oklahoma City Memorial, which invites survivors and relatives to occupy the empty chairs and to seek solace in this act of occupation and identification, Salcedo’s sculptures and installations offer neither consolation nor the opportunity to assume the position of the victim. A pertinent example is a sculptural work from 2008, one in an ongoing series of pieces in which furniture is eerily impaled with rebar and encased in concrete. Here, concrete fills a wooden chair and the space surrounding it in a way that inevitably recalls the furniture casts of British sculptor Rachel Whiteread. Like Salcedo’s concrete-encased chair, Whiteread’s artworks simultaneously mark and unmark the spaces of memory they convey, tracing the forgotten detritus that accrues in the constant accumulation of archival material (Townsend, 2004: 23). In Salcedo’s work, however, these investigations take on additional melancholic resonance, treating negative space as a metaphor for the space occupied by subjects whose presence is ignored, denied, or contested – the space of the immigrant, the exile, the displaced, the imprisoned, the disappeared. Salcedo’s chair, muted and immobilised, furthermore imagines these subjects trapped in scenes of imprisonment, torture and interrogation. Far from a place for reflection, comfort, or nostalgia, the untitled chair presents a space of silence, even unspeakability; in this way, it resonates with the role of the witness as conceptualised by Giorgio Agamben (1999), who maintains that ‘Whoever assumes the charge of bearing witness … must bear witness in the name of the impossibility of bearing witness’ (p. 34). And, I suggest, it is this impossibility of witnessing – precisely, in this work, the impossibility of inhabiting the space of the victim – that renders Salcedo’s work an exercise in unsettling processes of (over)identification with the suffering of the other (Figure 2).

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Figure 2.

Doris Salcedo, Untitled, 2008, wood, metal and concrete, 100 × 42 × 47 cm³. Photo: Todd White Art Photography. Image courtesy Alexander and Bonin, New York.

For Kaja Silverman (1996), certain aesthetic practices have the capacity to facilitate ethical relations that validate otherwise neglected subject positions, but only when these practices foreclose on the tendency to seek ‘idiopathic identification’ (the assimilative assumption of ‘psychic access to what does not “belong to us”’) and insist instead on relations based on ‘heteropathic recollection’ – the introduction of the ‘“not me” into my memory reserve (p. 4). The goal of ethical aesthetic enterprises, in other words, must be to encourage identification ‘according to an exteriorising, rather than an interiorising, logic’ (1996: 84). Salcedo’s sculptures, which preclude any desire an audience might have to occupy the position of the traumatised subject idiopathically, facilitate precisely the heteropathic processes of identification and recollection advocated by Silverman. Presenting domestic spaces torn asunder by acts of violence, Salcedo creates the conditions for her audience to inhabit not the traumatised spaces of uninhabitability, but perhaps a more nuanced understanding of home’s precarious status as a space of safety and belonging.

The Casa Viuda (Widowed House) series of 1992–1995 clarifies this point. The series – which features narrow, weathered wooden doors, combined with fragments of other furniture and embedded with cloth, zippers and bones – invokes the violent invasion of the political into domestic spaces, insisting that in times of war, the ‘homely’ is perpetually threatened by the intrusion of the ‘unhomely’. Itself a melancholic archive of the traumatising domestic consequences of political violence (inscribed into each piece, according to Salcedo, is a specific testimony from a survivor of the Dirty War), La Casa Viuda does not narrate stories of loss and upheaval but instead, as art historian Jill Bennett (2007) suggests, conveys ‘a place transformed by pain’ (p. 65). La Casa Viuda I, for example, recalls the testimony of a young boy who, after being warned by his parents not to open the front door to strangers, did so – only to have his home invaded by paramilitary troops and his father assassinated in front of him (Viso, 1996: 90). An oblique reference to this testimony, the sculpture consists of a free-standing door abutted by a section of a wooden chair partially wrapped in a gauzy lace that appears to cling to, even disappear into, the wood. Here, it is clear that the door, that threshold space between home and not-home designed both to open us out to the world and to protect us from it in times of trouble, has been divested of its purpose, standing unbuttressed in the open space of the gallery as if to underscore its own instability as a protective barrier. And while we, as viewers, are left to wonder as to the role of the chair – are we witnessing a last-ditch effort to bar the intruders? a lifeless body slumped against the door? – we are nonetheless confronted with a sense of terror and loss inscribed into the very fabric of the materials.

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Figure 3.

Doris Salcedo, La Casa Viuda I, 1992–1994. wood and fabric, 257.8 × 38.7 × 59.7 cm³. Collection Worcester Art Museum, Worcester. Image courtesy Alexander and Bonin, New York.

The intimate space of mute silence that forms around sculptures like Casa ViudaIcompels their audience into a relentlessly engaging experience wherein the desire to inhabit the spaces of traumatic experience is repelled at every turn. In Salcedo’s sculptural works, domestic references such as the chair serve to index a body that has been absented by violence; in essence, these objects – found and distorted – become archives of that which by its very absence simply cannot be represented, and yet demands acknowledgment and remembrance. This insistence is manifested equally in Salcedo’s early sculptural works and her later large-scale installations such as the Istanbul installation, which insist furthermore on public acknowledgment of private suffering. Echoing recent theorisations of trauma as a politically charged experience that calls for collective response (Cvetkovich, 2003), the Istanbul installation demands entry into the public archives of cultural memory. In so doing, Salcedo’s work furthermore asks for a comprehensive revision of our very conception of the archive.

Domestic disturbances, public archives

In An Archive of Feelings, Ann Cvetkovich (2003) develops an approach to trauma that postulates the productive value of critical trauma cultures – ‘public cultures that form in and around trauma’ (p. 9) and through which new practices and publics are formed. Arguing that trauma theory tends to devalue private, localised experiences of suffering and loss, Cvetkovich (2003) suggests that cultural production – art, literature, performance and activism – can mobilise an affective investment in and around trauma that will facilitate political (rather than medical or therapeutic) responses. Such practices, which Cvetkovich acknowledges are often as ephemeral as the traumatising experiences that generate them, must nevertheless be integrated into public culture as archival resources, thereby also revealing the need to reinvent the archive as ‘itself a form of mourning’ (p. 238). In recent large-scale projects, Doris Salcedo has exhibited a congruent interest in making private trauma a matter of public archivisation. Two salient examples, both of which again employ the chair motif to evoke absent human presence, are Tenebrae: Noviembre 6, 1985, installed at the Cambden Arts Centre, London, in 1999–2000, and Noviembre 6 y 7, a performance-installation at the Palace of Justice in Bogotá, Colombia, in 2002, both of which reference the 1985 storming of the Colombian High Court by M-19 guerrillas, and the subsequent siege and battle which left over 100 people dead, 17 missing and the building in flames. The first work, Tenebrae, is an installation of 13 upended lead-cast chairs, barely recognisable because of radically attenuated legs that extend across the expanse of the room, becoming barriers across the entranceway (Figure 4). The second, Noviembre 6 y 7, was a 2-day performance marking the 54 hours of battle in 1985, and entailed the glacially slow lowering of hundreds of wooden chairs down the façade of the Palace of Justice.

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Figure 4.

Doris Salcedo, Tenebrae: Noviembre 7, 1985 1999–2000, lead and steel in 39 parts, installed in two spaces: 4.16 × 5.27 m² (depth × width); 8.5 × 6.61 m² (depth × width). Image courtesy Alexander and Bonin, New York.

The argument can and has been made that these two works demonstrate not simply a move toward larger installations, but a shift in the artist’s perspective from domestic trauma to the traumatising condition of geopolitical displacement (Bennett, 2003: 191–192). But while her recent projects indeed involve a less intimate treatment of subject matter in terms of both scale and material (as art historian Jill Bennett notes, lead-cast works such as Tenebrae remove all indexical traces of the human, including the artist’s hand), does it necessarily follow that the artist’s recent works have shifted away from the issue of domestic unsettlement? This is not simply a rhetorical or semantic question, but rather, one with profound implications, for the point to remember is that issues of belonging can never be extricated from those of spatial displacement. Particularly (but not exclusively) in Colombia, where for decades, citizens’ homes have been battlegrounds in the waging of the Dirty War, and where these invasions have led to massive internal displacement, belonging is inevitably (and especially in times of war) a precariously held condition, always in danger of succumbing to the condition of displacement. It is indeed this threat of dislocation that lurks in the shadows of home – a territory, as Homi Bhabha (1997) suggests, ‘of both disorientation and relocation, with all the fragility and fecundity implied by such a double take’ (p. 11). This double take, or dialectic if you prefer, is insightfully revealed in Salcedo’s early works, which already constitute sustained reflection on displacement and the precarious occupation of space. As the title Casa Viuda implies, home can do little more than mourn the loss of its inhabitants.

Salcedo’s recent large-scale works likewise render space a precarious entity, inoperative as a stable site of belonging and fragile as an archive (or widow) of human memory. At the same time, the very public nature of these installations reveals Salcedo’s increasingly urgent commitment to the notion that just as violence in the public sphere infiltrates the presumedly safe realm of the domestic, so too must the intimately felt consequences of violence be attended to publicly, in such a way that Salcedo’s installations have come to function as public archives of loss. In installations like Tenebrae and Noviembre 6 y 7, the precarious nature of the archive as a home for loss continues to figure largely, again thanks to the saturated referential quality of the chair, whose capacity to recall the human body (or more precisely, to mark the absence of the body) is again called upon to convey the body’s fragility while haunting us with its absent presence. Thus, the steel chairs of Tenebrae, prone and extended across the gallery floor, can be understood as metaphors for civilians caught in war’s crossfire, attempting to flee but caught dead in their tracks. But the chairs themselves, exaggeratedly attenuated as they stretch across the space, also stretch any inclination to identify them as indexes, or even metaphors, of the human body. At the same time, the extended chairs function quite literally as barriers against any desire we might manifest to inhabit the space of suffering. Rather than offering a space for identification with the suffering of others, we as viewers are asked to relate to the work from our own mediated spectatorial positions.

The chairs that are slowly lowered down the façade of Bogotá’s Palace of Justice in Noviembre 6 y 7 bear similarly evocative (if less oblique) traces of human presence. Whereas Mieke Bal (2007) has suggested that the chairs in this installation form a sort of second shell, ‘the façade behind which the dark side of state power hid its terror’ (p. 55) that, as they fall, bring this façade ‘down with them’, my own reading of the work (itself haunted by short-lived but searing public images of people falling and jumping from towers on 11 September 2001) can register only human figures, tumbling to the earth in cinematic slow motion as if to escape a burning building. Salcedo here articulates a deep mistrust of architecture’s capacity to shelter and protect that also mobilises an affective registration of the precariousness with which we occupy these spaces – a sense of precariousness borne out by her own comments on the work:

The empty chairs are statements of absence allowing one to be aware of the fragility of those who were behind those walls seventeen years ago. Exposed and suspended on the stone façade, the empty chair emphasises the vulnerability, not only of those who worked in the Palace of Justice, but of us all. This piece is vulnerable from within and unprotected on the exterior. (Salcedo, 2007: 83)

Here, we can identify a forceful continuum emerging in Salcedo’s practice, in which the precariousness of belonging, memory and displacement continues to figure largely, though with an even greater sense of urgency, as these issues are now articulated as a violent confrontation between the public and the private. If there is an important conceptual distinction to be made between Salcedo’s early sculptures and her recent installations, it is that her recent works, particularly those sited in public places, take this confrontation – which inevitably begins with the violation of the public into private spaces – back to the public domain, where they become melancholic archives that function, and here, I am in complete accord with Mieke Bal, to ‘redefine monumentality’. Salcedo, continues Bal (2007), ‘reconstitutes monuments as social spaces where intimacy and politics meet; where the ruptured intimacy of others, affectively experienced, cries out for political action’ (p. 55).

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Figure 5.

Doris Salcedo, Noviembre 6 y 7, installation, Bogotá, 2002. Photo: Sergio Clavijo. Image courtesy Alexander and Bonin, New York.

(Un)accommodating memory

The transient nature of Salcedo’s public installations further contributes to their capacity to redefine the function of public spaces of memory, and this ephemerality emblematises my understanding of ‘melancholic archivisation’ – archival practices that, by contesting the archive’s capacity to own and safeguard history, instead present the past as a Benjaminian flash of traces, which ideally activate both the archive’s relationship with the past and the viewer’s relation with the archive in the present. But what traces flash up to be seized in Salcedo’s Istanbul installation? If we accept, as I have been insisting we must, that chairs in Salcedo’s art practice function primarily as melancholic stand-ins for the absent human body, then this mass of chairs might be understood to connote a context of confinement. Although there are, somewhat shockingly, no street-side barriers or fencing around the installation, the chairs are so tightly enmeshed and intricately entwined that the flushness of the surface itself suggests the site as a holding tank of sorts, a prison with invisible bars. This reading would be in keeping with Salcedo’s efforts to visually articulate the vulnerable occupation of spaces of confinement, a pertinent example of which is Neither, a 2004 installation at London’s White Cube Gallery that effected a transformation of the exhibition space into an ambiguous site of expansive incarceration. The installation, a room lined with plasterboard into which chain-link fencing has been embedded to produce a ghostly sort of compound, resembles, as one critic suggests, a refugee camp or detention centre (Wong, 2007: 184) – increasingly ubiquitous places where detainees are reduced to what Giorgio Agamben (1998) calls ‘bare life’ and undergo what Judith Butler (2004) describes as a process of ‘desubjectivation’ that leaves them unprotected by international protocol, unentitled to due legal process, and thus ‘something less than human … an equivocation of the human’ (p. 74).

But if the Istanbul installation articulates, like Neither, a space of abject, even spectacular (to the extent that both installations also convey the condition of overexposure) confinement, its contents – hundreds of haphazardly deposited chairs – suggest an even bleaker set of associations. Given the genealogy that I have traced in which chairs function as multiply referential stand-ins for the human figure, it becomes difficult not to encounter this jumble of 1550 interlocking chairs not simply as a pile of chairs, but instead, a pile of human bodies – or, to be terribly precise, the abused, anonymous, emaciated bodies that haunt our collective memory bank of all-too familiar images (both photographic and imagined) of the countless mass graves – from 1945-Poland to 1994-Rwanda – that bear witness to the twentieth century’s penchant for horror. Indeed, given the location of the installation in Istanbul, along with the curious fact that the work remains untitled, I am compelled to read the installation as a silent witness to the Armenian Genocide of 1915 – a massacre that has yet to be acknowledged in much of the world, and which remains unapologetically refuted in Turkey (see Hovannisian, 1986). It is this unspoken allusion to mass graves that mobilises my reading of Salcedo’s Istanbul installation as a melancholic archive, for mass graves can themselves be understood as quintessential melancholic archives. Excruciatingly detailed but shockingly anonymous indexical traces of mass murder or genocide, mass graves are archival sources that fail spectacularly to supply answers to the questions that haunt them: Who? How? And most importantly but perhaps also most futilely, Why? This failure to offer secrets from the grave compels us into a perpetually interrogative mode, as if refusing the closure that would necessarily attend their consignment to the historical record.

Elusive archives

As an archive, Salcedo’s Istanbul installation is frustratingly elusive, rendered so by Salcedo’s rejection of spectacles of violence and suffering. To a certain degree, then, it is useful to align Salcedo’s work with recent art practices that lament the image’s impotence in the face of catastrophe, a reading that is given credence by the artist’s resolute disinclination to visualise traumatic experience:

I’m not interested in the visual. I have constructed the work as invisibility, because I regard the non-visual as representing a lack of power. To see is to have power; it’s a way of possessing …. What I’m addressing in the work is something which is actually in the process of vanishing. (Princenthal, 2000: 26)

Or, compare Salcedo’s metonymic use of domestic furniture to the paintings of another Colombian artist, Ferdinand Botero, whose restagings of abuse photographs at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, while equally unsettling in their cartoon-like ferocity, nevertheless grant full visual access to bodies in pain. On the contrary, the human body in Salcedo’s work is, as one critic observes, ‘just as absent and elusive as it would be in any memory of the past’ (Huyssen, 2003: 111).

But while Salcedo’s aesthetic strategy can certainly be analysed in the context of recent scepticism in visual culture studies regarding the extent to which images are capable of generating an engagement with the suffering of others that goes beyond shock, catharsis and the collective desire to spectacularise pain, there is something almost disingenuous about visual art’s recent disavowal of the visual, invariably accompanied by visual representations of this very disavowal. On the contrary, I would argue that Salcedo’s practice betrays a deep investment in pursuing the unique capacity of visual images to convey the affective, corporeal implications of traumatic experience. What Salcedo challenges is the spectacular use of imagery – the shock effect – which produces, she fears, at best a fleeting sense of outrage and at worst a premature sense of catharsis, even pleasure. Her work cannot, however, be considered simply as a facile rejection of imagery as a viable methodology for conveying trauma. To the extent that Salcedo does not reject visual strategies of representation, I would instead align her practice, conditionally at least, with recent defences of imagery in the face of atrocity.

In his 2008 Images in Spite of All, art historian Georges Didi-Huberman engages with the ethics of representation through an examination of four controversial photographs that survived the Nazi concentration camp at Auschwitz in Poland. For Didi-Huberman, the survival of these images malgré tout (in spite of everything) asks us to acknowledge the necessity of imagining the Holocaust. Capitulation to the discourse of horror’s unrepresentability is complicit, he suggests, with the Nazi project of making the tools of the extermination disappear, of ‘obliterating every remnant’ (Didi-Huberman, 2008: 21). According to this provocative (and itself controversial) argument, images are neither deficient simulacra nor transparent documents, but rather traces whose very entry into the archive serve as reminders that ‘to bear witness is to tell in spite of all that which it is impossible to tell entirely’ (Didi-Huberman, 2008: 105). Given the experiences that Salcedo seeks to examine in her work – the ‘bare life’ of the camp inmate, the ‘negative space’ of the immigrant, and the ongoing disappearances that are a common facet of a decades-long state of emergency in Colombia, where citizens continue to disappear without a trace – Salcedo’s work is less about rejecting images than about building an archive that, however meagre, will constitute some kind of fragile memory bank.

And yet, Salcedo’s melancholic attachment to the past also resists easy entry into the archives of public memory. In this respect, the Istanbul installation can be usefully compared to French artist Christian Boltanski’s Missing House of 1990, whose formal similarities to Salcedo’s installation are unmistakable, but whose divergent conceptual strategies underline the stakes and conditions of melancholic archivisation. In East Berlin, Boltanski researched the history of an empty lot where a house destroyed during World War II once stood. On the walls of adjacent houses, Boltanski attached plates describing prior occupants of the house, and at a separate location in West Berlin he displayed documents concerning these (mostly Jewish) residents, some of whom had been deported to concentration camps during Nazi rule. Like Salcedo, Boltanski employs the trope of home in order to activate it as a source of buried archival knowledge. But whereas Boltanski’s installation mines existing archives for lost and forgotten evidence, demanding precise and detailed recognition of the histories buried at this site, Salcedo declines to offer such a direct (if incomplete) conduit to the past. Instead, we are required to make our own meaning and draw our own conclusions. In Salcedo’s work, home reveals itself as an unsettled space of archivisation, just as the archive is revealed as a troubled home for loss.

The future of the melancholic archive

Pondering the future of globalisation in a post-9/11 world, Homi Bhabha (2002) proposes ‘unbuilding’ as a paradigm for challenging the West’s now largely discredited faith in progress:

The times and places in which we live confront our sense of Progress with the image of the Unbuilt. The Unbuilt is not a place you can reach with a ladder … The rubble and debris that survive carry the memories of other fallen towers, Babel for instance, and lessons of endless ladders that suddenly collapse beneath our feet. We have no choice but to place, in full view of our buildings, the vision of the Unbuilt – the foundation of possible buildings … other alternative worlds. (pp. 363–364)

In a visceral way, Doris Salcedo’s Istanbul installation conveys Bhabha’s vision of the Unbuilt – a vision that reveals Western ideals of progress and modernity to be a crumbling empire of fallen towers and collapsed ladders. Indeed, while I have argued that the Istanbul installation’s hundreds of chairs read as a sort of oblique anthropology of human suffering, the installation in its entirety also recalls something more akin to an archaeological ruin – Salcedo’s work translates immaterial traces of the past into material relics in the present. Importantly, what this also suggests is that Salcedo is less interested in acting out the moment of catastrophe than in rendering its charged affective repercussions available to those who would bear secondary witness. Jill Bennett’s (2002) analysis of Salcedo’s practice is insightful in this respect, recognising that her works align us ‘with the witnesses who live out the reality of loss in a context where pain is not contained in the single moment but is present in everyday life, in all interactions’ (p. 346). In this way, Salcedo conceives melancholia not simply as a failure to escape an unreconciled past, but as a carrying of that unsettled past into the present and for the future. Resonating strongly with Bhabha’s conception of the Unbuilt as the ‘foundation of possible buildings … other alternative worlds’, Salcedo’s melancholic archives, produced out of the ruins of history, demonstrate what is perhaps contemporary art’s unique contribution to the future of memory: A capacity to unsettle our collective relationship with the past while imagining a better future.

In this way too, contemporary art is perhaps uniquely equipped to fulfill Derrida’s (1996) mandate for the archive, which is to conceive of itself as an open question:

The question of the archive is not, I repeat, a question of the past, the question of a concept dealing with the past which already might either be at our disposal or not at our disposal, an archivable concept of the archive, but rather a question of the future, the very question of the future, question of a response, of a promise and of a responsibility for tomorrow. The archive: if we want to know what this will have meant, we will only know tomorrow. (p. 36)

Salcedo’s melancholic archive, to recall Foster’s (2004) (an)archival aesthetic, is likewise ‘founded on disaster’ and ‘pledged against a ruin that it cannot forestall’ (p. 5). But it nevertheless points forward in time. Defying both the pathology of nihilism and the politics of redemption, it asks us to recognise both the universality and the materiality of human precariousness in ways that might ideally mobilise heteropathically unsettling responses to the suffering of others. Such responses in turn possess the capacity to reshape our collective understanding of the past, the present and indeed the future.