The title of this chapter is “Designing to Support Memory and Identity,” and so far it has focussed on how personal furniture can support the “identity projects” of living persons. This section examines works from the Untitled series of sculptor Doris Salcedo, an artist who often employs furniture and clothing to address the grief wrought by militant violence
in Colombia. While Salcedo’s work argues for the importance of memorialisation, for
materially resisting the oblivion that threatens the unacknowledged dead, it also informs Collecting Ourselves because it communicates something essential about how home furniture supports us, the living; the works I will discuss here undercut our embodied understanding of furniture, negating an integral aspect of how we experience a home. Introducing a 2015 retrospective of Salcedo’s work, Chicago museum director Madeleine Grynsztejn writes:
[T]here is a consistent use of pieces of domestic furniture—some found, including some that once belonged to victims of political violence, and some made in the studio. In Salcedo’s hands, these objects, closely tied to human presence and to the social fabric of the everyday, are
3-7 Chasse with the Life of Christ. French, ca. 1235-45. Metropolitan Museum collection. Author's photo.
dismembered and regrafted together in disturbing juxtapositions. They are made functionless save for their clear conveyance of some destructive process wreaked upon the home.15
In discussing Salcedo’s work, philosopher Judith Butler identifies these pieces as
“counter-monuments” made from the “shadows of the absent body,”16 implicating what
these chairs, cupboards, beds and clothes signify —the corporeal human body. Butler’s term counter-monument opposes Salcedo’s sculptures to what art historian Arthur Danto defines as the usual task of monuments, to “make heroes and triumphs, victories and
15 Doris Salcedo et al., Doris Salcedo (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2015), 12.
16 Judith Butler, "Shadows of the Absent Body" (paper presented at the Topography of Loss: A symposium on
Doris Salcedo, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 2 March 2017). https://youtu.be/9o9_ZP2Z7aI.
3-8 Untitled. By Doris Salcedo, 1995, Guggenheim Museum retrospective exhibition, NYC, 2015. Author's photo.
conquests, perpetually present and part of life.”17 Danto claims that memorials, unlike
monuments, are a public endeavour to honour the fallen, often incorporating lists naming those who died. Monuments, he notes, never recall the dead.
These sculptures are also counter-monuments in that they conjoin gallery interiors with domestic settings rather than engaging the civic square; here Salcedo’s work alludes to the violated rural homes where people were abducted then never seen again. Salcedo translates the mourning of officially unrecognised victims into a public, collective
17 Arthur C. Danto, "The Vietnam Veterans Memorial," The Nation. (31 Aug. 1985): 152.
3-9 Untitled. By Doris Salcedo, 1989-90, Guggenheim Museum retrospective exhibition, NYC, 2015. Author's photo.
experience by altering and re-presenting artefacts from country homes: dismembered timber furniture, white plantation work shirts stacked and impaled by steel rods, or a child’s dress trapped against glass doors, caught between our gaze and the flood of cement
seizing the fabric folds from behind.
Judith Butler speaks to why Salcedo’s sculptures of mourning are significant:
It’s actually quite important that there be a sensate relation to these
objects, a tactile and sensate relation, because one of the problems is that … the hideous work of oblivion takes aim at the senses. You will not feel this. You will feel nothing. This will be covered over. It did not happen. This will not register. So the idea that the senses are being provoked … works against the deadening effects of dissociation and denial, and it enlivens the senses and makes them responsive in a way that can lead to responsibility of some kind.18
18 Judith Butler, "Closing Remarks" (paper presented at the Topography of Loss: a symposium on Doris
Salcedo, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 3 March 2017). https://youtu.be/QRItn3zC9Eg.
3-10 Detail from Untitled. By Doris Salcedo, 1995, Guggenheim Museum retrospective exhibition, NYC, 2015. Author's photo.
Though Butler and Salcedo are engaged in broader socio-political battles, this notion of
provoking “a sensate relation” to objects accords with the goal of Collecting Ourselves to
activate a practice of engagement with our possessions, combating the dissociation and denial that accompanies mothballing our things. This is an aspect of the
Collecting Ourselves project the long-term effects of which are difficult to predict. Like Salcedo, my intention is not to reignite the oppressive repercussions of trauma, but to engage others in our lives and to spark awakenings through encounters with emotionally charged objects.
As noted, Butler describes the use of clothing and furniture in works like Untitled as the
“shadows of the absent body,” evoking the after-image of the disappeared; yet, Butler’s
expression ghosts over the weight of what Salcedo does place before us, the physical presence of concrete, the blunt imposition of existential violence that Salcedo’s precisely formed concrete conveys. We grasp the homeliness of chairs and cupboards, but Salcedo subverts our understanding of these images by entombing them with concrete masses that repel us from the shelter of their interior. In “The Dialectics of Outside and Inside,”
Bachelard states that void is “the raw material of possibility of being. [Without void we] are
banished from the realm of possibility.”19 Our embodied experience of home depends on
the receptive, receptacle-quality of furniture. Without interiority, the home’s status as refuge, its offering of secure emplacement, is obliterated.
In these sculptural works Salcedo creates affective sites of mourning, interior
landmarks, albeit ones that recall habitation within a gallery setting while simultaneously denying habitability. Many of her works foreground the convention of material obduracy in the practice of memorialisation; however, the works pivot on the simultaneous
formalization of violent acts (dismembered furniture, trapped clothes) and the attempt to objectify incalculable loss and grief (re-presenting surrogate objects that can no longer function, re-presenting domestic spaces that are now uninhabitable). My initial interest in
Salcedo’s work was sparked by her use of clothing and furniture (the things that contain us)
as material proxies, capable of evoking human presence, and her practice of haunting sculptures of mourning with such proxies. Though Collecting Ourselves aims to support
personal remembrance, strengthen ancestral kinship ties, and even carry the material evidence of persons deceased, it endeavours to do so as a vital, flourishing furnitural space; vessel-like, at its centre it must be empty.