On _Atrabiliarios_ by Doris Salcedo - Von Der Walde

8/12/2019 On _Atrabiliarios_ by Doris Salcedo - Von Der Walde

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DRAFT

Memory and Melancholia: On Atrabiliariosby Doris

SalcedoErna von der Walde

In the series Atrabiliarios (1991-96), Colombian artist Doris Salcedo has

masterfully achieved to represent the impossibility of mourning in a situation

where no closure can be foreseen and to suggest the need for some form of

melancholia as a strategy for survival. The work consists of a row of small alcoves

on a wall, each of them containing old shoes, some in pairs, others without mate,

bearing the marks of wear. The shoes were donated to the artists by the families of

the disappeared women to whom they belonged. Each alcove is covered by a sheetof translucent animal hide crudely stitched to the wall with surgical thread. Below,

on the floor, are small boxes, shoeboxes or possible coffins, made from the same

animal skin.

At the same time that we can see the contour, the colour, some of the features of

the shoes through the parchment, the image is opaque enough to hidewhat mightlie behind the shoes: the bodies of the disappeared, the missing element which

could enable us to make use of the small caskets awaiting their content, and begin

the process of mourning.
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The piece explores the complexity of making visible the invisible. It is not only

about the possible loss of these lives, but also about their absence for the survivors

and the lack of visibility of the victims in collective awareness. Thus, the animal

skin covers the shoes but allows us to see them as a phantasmatic image: a trace of

the shoe as a trace of the life that displaced it from an inert object to meaningfulusage.

The installation opens up to different strategies of association and meaning. The

old shoes recall the horrifying images of Auschwitz, of the belongings of the dead

carefully classified and ordered for recycling: the economy of death.1[1] The alcoves

are like the niches in the columbaria of old cemeteries, providing a grave for the

bodies of the disappeared. The fact that they are not entirely covered, that one can

see the shoes through the animal skin, leaves these women somewhere in between

life and death: the condition of being a disappeared person, neither present nortotally absent, neither here nor somewhere else. It refers us to the dangling

condition of the survivors, incapable of engaging in the process of mourning, for it

would mean abandoning hope.

The alcoves can likewise evoke gas chambers, prison cells, or torture chambers:

part of the array of the imaginary of institutional violence in the 20th century.

These disappeared women are evoked in a personal, touching instant, but their

individuality is at the same time massified by a history that seems to turn each

case into just one more. How to evoke the singularity of the individual plights and

predicaments, the sorrow and pain?

1See Marguerite Feitlowitz, An Interview with Doris Salcedo, inCrimes of War Project (Cultural

Supplement to Colombia Magazine) (August 2001), WWW Documents


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The title of the piece Atrabiliarios- equally opens up to multiple references. It

carries the archaic sense of bodily humours influencing character: the atrabilis, or

black bile, the humour to which irritability and gloominess were attributed. At the

same time, in its origins it is the Latin version of the Greek melancholia. Salcedosinstallation, however, does not use this noun and its more direct links to

melancholy, although evidently the piece is all about melancholia, the impossibility

and undesirability of letting go, of giving up the love object.

The adjective form atrabilious, in Spanish becomes also anoun, atrabiliario,

which opens up to a different constellation of meanings, shifting the possible

psychoanalytic and intimate connotations to the social and the political. In the

Dictionary of the Spanish Academy (DRAE), atrabiliario is defined as an archaism

which means de genio destemplado y violento (of violent and untempredcharacter). In Colombia, independently of how dictionaries define the term, it has

strong social connotations. Atrabiliario has been linked to the masses and the

populace as violent and enraged. Atrabiliarios were the men and women who

constituted the populacho, gleba andchusma of April 9, 1948 in the popular

insurrections caused by the assassination of populist liberal leader Jorge Elicer

Gaitn.2Atrabiliarios appears in the political discourse when the struggles of union

workers and all forms of social protest are being dismissed. Through the

qualification of participants as atrabiliarios, their actions are attributed to their

humours and character, to a medicated condition of black bile.

Who are the atrabiliarios of Salcedos installation? In English, the title of the piece

has been translated asDefiant, placing the meaning on the side of the victims and

the surviving relatives who would be defying their disappearance and the ensuing

forgetfulness. However, the piece is called Atrabiliarios in the masculine, not in

the feminine of the victims. Could it not be read as the victims using the term

against the victimizers, using against them the pejorative connotations the word

has acquired?

At the same time, though, the word can evoke the story behind the disappearances:

the long history of inherited hatred, of violence used to counter violence, of revenge

as legitimating the use of violence. The word carries the undertones of the many

2See Carlos Mario Perea, Esa tarde inenarrable e intil,Revista Historia Crtica, 17 (July-

December 1998), 29-38. Special issue dedicated to the 50th anniversary of the death of Gaitn.


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forms of intolerance that pervade Colombian society. For atrabiliario has become

everyone, as can be read in this description that historian Gonzalo Snchez made of

the features of the degradation of the Colombian conflict at about the same time

that Salcedo presented her piece:

Se mata a campesinos por ser campesinos, a obreros por ser obreros, a maestros

por ser maestros, a jueces o periodistas por cumplir con su misin, a prostitutas,

mendigos y homosexuales porque resulta intolerable que lo sean, a soldados,

policas o guerrilleros fuera de combate, porque pareceran no caber en el mismo

tipo de sociedad, y as sucesivamente. Es una guerra de todos contra todos, en

una sociedad con un altsimo porcentaje de su poblacin armada o protegida por

las armas. Es una guerra no slo punitiva sino tambin preventiva contra quien

se supone puede llegar a ser subversivo, traidor o simplemente contendor en elescenario ms amplio de la poltica o en el ms discreto de las relaciones

interpresonales. [] es una guerra de la sociedad entera consigo misma. Es el

suicidio colectivo.3

[Peasantas are being killed because they are peasants; workers because they are

workers; teachers because they are teachers; judges and journalists for doing

their job; prostitutes, beggars and homosexuals because it is unacceptable that

they are who they are; soldiers, policemen or demobilised guerrilla because

apparently they should not belong to the same society, and so on. This is a war of

all against all in a society in which a high percentage of the population bears

weapons or is protected by weapons. This is a punitive war and at the same time

a preemptive war against those who can become subversive, a traitor or simply

an opponent in the wider stage of politics or in the more discreet of interpersonal

relationships [...] this is a war of the whole of society against itself. This is

collective suicide.]

In my view, Salcedos Atrabiliarios poses one of the most daunting questions for

Colombian society: in a situation of permanent warfare, with no clear sides in theconflict, how can the survivors approach mourning? How can they account for the

loss if the conflict not only is ongoing, but it does not seem to have a foreseeable

3Gonzalo Snchez, Guerra y poltica en la sociedad colombiana(Bogot: El ncora Editores, 1991),

pp. 214-215.


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end, a point where survivors can start collecting their dead to be able follow the

rituals and procedures of remembrance that can put them to rest in peace and let

the living go on with their lives? It is in this sense that I see Atrabiliarios not only

as a work that addresses the individual destinies of the disappeared women, butthat also reveals the very condition of impossible mourning, of a permanent

melancholia, of insurmountable feelings of loss facing Colombians in this endless

conflict.

Colombia lies in a state of melancholia. This is not meant as a diagnosis of the

collective, but rather as an attempt to grasp the predicaments of constructing

narratives, be they historical or literary, when in spite of many changes, of the

multiple avatars of conflict, there seems to be no sense of closure: Se siente como

si en un mismo movimiento todo hubiera sido removido, sin que nada hubieracambiado (It feels as if everything has been shattered and at the same time

that nothing has changed), was the poignant observation of Snchez to the effect of

violence that proliferates and disseminates itself without bringing about a

transformation.4[4] Individual loss shakes the very foundations of purpose in the

lives of the survivors, but there are no foundations in the collective that could

restore meaning, and one experiences the loss of a sense of historicity, as it were.

There is a sense of defiance, informed by this melancholia, in the displaced

populations that reclaim the restoration of their lands. They refuse to accept the

attacks of guerrilla, but mostly paramilitary groups, as an irreversible event, that is,

as historicalin the sense that it should be processed as the end of a certain form of

life and the beginning of another. There is a sense of defiance in the many

Colombians who have gone into exile under threats of death and yet return to the

country when they feel psychologically prepared to face the fear that will always

accompany them. Atrabiliarios those we can sympathise with at the bottom-line of

common humanity and for the position they occupy as innocent victims in this

war of all against all. Equally atrabiliarios, though, are the many of the

perpetrators who justify their actions in terms of avenging the loss of loved ones.

A long history of cuentas por saldar (pending accounts), of books that are being

kept with the list of losses on one side or the other: this was magnificently brought

to the point by the leader of the FARC guerrilla, Manuel Marulanda Vlez Tirofijo

4Snchez, Guerra y poltica, p. 12.
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in his historical encounter with President Andrs Pastrana in 1999 during the peace

process that was to be frustrated. Tirofijo confronted the President with a list of

the men, the cattle, the hens and pigs that he and his people had lost in 1964 when

the Colombian army bombed the town of Marquetalia in the first of many counter-insurgency attacks, the one that was to mark the transition from the classical

Violencia of the 1940s and 50s to the Cold war strategies of the 60s and 70s.5

Defiant and brave the project of CINEP and JUSTICIA Y PAZ, two organizations

which created in 1987 a database to keep track of the countless violations of human

rights and of the unbearable amount of crimes against humanity committed by the

state forces and its satellites. In their statement of purpose, they declare that this

great effort is guided by an illusion:

que el conflicto se acerque cada vez ms a parmetros humanitarios, al menos

mientras la sinrazn de una solucin militar y no poltica y racional siga

predominando, y que la sociedad guarde de alguna manera la memoria, as sea

precaria o incompleta, de aquello que algn da deber exorcizar mediante una

opcin histrica: que este tipo de violencia NUNCA MS vuelva a ser tolerada.

[CINEP, El Banco de Datos de CINEP & Justicia y Paz inBanco de datos:

panorama de derechos humanos y violencia poltica en Colombia (n.d.), WWW

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On _Atrabiliarios_ by Doris Salcedo - Von Der Walde

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