Doris Salcedo’s work calls towards the conjuring of absent testimony and silent witnesses. Across a broad range of works, Salcedo evokes the unwitnessed deaths of thousands of ‘missing’ Columbian peoples who disappeared in the early 21^st century. This paper explores how the work of Maurice Blanchot – in particular The Instant of My Death (1994) – can help us understand the deconstruction of witnessing and testimony in Salcedo’s works Plegaria Muda (2008-10) and A Flor de Piel (2012). In both works Salcedo evokes the silent witness, a spectre (Derrida, 1996) that calls forth a responsibility to mourn the missing. This paper considers how Salcedo’s conjuring of silence locates testimony as a work in continual opposition to both truth and fiction, and in so doing proposes a new location of witnessing that demands a new approach to testimony.

Item Type:	Refereed Article
Keywords:	Colombia, Doris Salcedo, witnessing, testimony, sculpture
Research Division:	Creative Arts and Writing
Research Group:	Art history, theory and criticism
Research Field:	Art history
Objective Division:	Culture and Society
Objective Group:	Understanding past societies
Objective Field:	Understanding the past of the Americas
UTAS Author:	Juliff, T (Dr Toby Juliff)
ID Code:	148302
Year Published:	2021
Web of Science® Times Cited:	1
Deposited By:	Art
Deposited On:	2021-12-17
Last Modified:	2022-01-13
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