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As the world turns toward another fractured year, Doris Salcedo, the Colombian artist, is at work trying to fathom how to create a house out of human hair. Salcedo, 65, has long made herself a channel of collective trauma, her art expressing profound anger at political crimes and atrocities at home and abroad – as well as creating imaginative spaces for mourning. Her hair project, she says, comes in response to what she has come to think of as “domicide”: the calculated bombing and destruction of places that people call home.
“Most of my work is a response of some kind to war,” she says. “And we have all witnessed – of course for decades in Colombia, but also now in Ukraine and Syria and Sudan and in Gaza – this destruction of houses for the sole purpose of escalating human suffering. In Gaza some people have rebuilt their houses several times and seen them destroyed again. So I was thinking, how does it feel to be somewhere where there are no bricks, no concrete, no wood, absolutely nothing you can build with? And I thought: OK, it’s like a spider, wanting to construct something from inside. So I’m trying to make a gigantic spider web house out of human hair. And on top of being made out of human hair, it’s being ripped apart.”
Salcedo is explaining this to me on a Zoom call from her home in Bogotá. Her own fabulous shock of hair fills the screen on my desk as she talks precisely and animatedly about her work – a career that this year is being celebrated by London’s Whitechapel Gallery, which has made Salcedo its “art icon” for 2025. The artist, who has collected just about every global award going, is perhaps best known in Britain for her memorable 2007 intervention in the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern, when she created a jagged crack 548ft long in the concrete floor of the gallery itself, and called it Shibboleth. Like all of her work, that chasm, still visible in outline, a foot or so wide, meant different things to different people (not least to the handful, among the hundreds of thousands who visited, who somehow failed to notice the great crack and tripped into it). Salcedo, the first non-white artist to be invited to fill the Tate space, imagined her work then as a metaphor for the fundamental divides and weaknesses in the foundations of our cultures, legacies of colonial history. As “culture war” arguments about those divides have only multiplied in subsequent years, her evocative schism seems prophetic of the forces that continue to create new versions of us and them.
Salcedo has, she says, reluctantly got used to that feeling of being a kind of artistic Cassandra. She views it as an accident of geography as much as fate. Having lived through more than 50 years of civil war in her native country, and having witnessed the fallout of that conflict in the displacement of millions of people, and in endemic political corruption and environmental destruction, she has watched those tragic patterns being replayed in war zones across the world.
The balance of things has changed in those decades, she says. “When I was young, we were told that if third world countries behaved properly, then they would rise to become second and then first world countries,” she says. As she has got older she has seen instead the reverse happen. The advance of populism and kleptocracy in the “developed” world – symbolised by the second election of Trump – has seen many more countries begin to resemble the worst extremes of her own. “The experience I had been gathering all my life in Colombia,” she says, “has become more pertinent. In a sad way, I think I’m in a better position to understand and to grasp the depth and the pain of those events.”
At the heart of all of Salcedo’s work has been the often courageous journalistic act of bearing witness. Over many years, she has collected the stories of survivors and victims of war: people who have seen loved ones tortured and murdered, women who have been raped. Those testimonies are the starting point for her sculptural works – often on a dramatic public scale. When her friend, the Colombian peace activist and political satirist Jaime Garzon, was assassinated in 1999, for example, she organised Bogotá’s main square to be filled with tens of thousands of votive candles and laid down a two-mile-long path of red roses in the city’s streets. During the long years when hundreds of thousands of Colombian citizens were killed or “disappeared” by government-backed death squads and rebel guerrilla groups and criminal gangs, she produced a series of pieces that focused on the violation of the domestic space – tables and chairs and cupboards filled with concrete and wire mixed with clothes and buttons and bones – furniture itself mortally wounded by the human horror.
She cannot, if she is honest, really remember a time before she had this sense of vocation, to become something like her country’s conscience. She was born in 1958; her father was a “really unsuccessful small businessman” and her mother made fancy dresses for weddings. “She was an amazing woman,” she says, “a feminist of her time, well read, and she encouraged me to follow what I wanted to do.” That thing was always art. “All my life the only thing I could do was drawing. If you are in a country like Colombia, there’s no way you can be away from the political; the war was always there. So when I decided to become an artist, it was clear that I was going to be a political artist.”
A big shift in her work came in 1985, when the war that had long created terror in towns and villages around Bogotá came to the centre of the city – in the siege of the palace of justice, which left 98 people dead, including 13 of the 25 supreme court judges. In 2002 Salcedo created a performance piece that, on the anniversary of the event, lowered empty wooden chairs from the roof of the building at the particular time of day each victim was believed to have been killed. She had been away in the US studying art prior to that tragedy, and seeing it first-hand brought many of her ideas into focus. “That was the first act of war that I witnessed directly,” she says, “and that experience is still imprinted in my mind. I had done political works before that, but it is true it was absolutely a turning point, not only for me, but for the politics of the country. Violence that was kept quiet or hidden before then came to the surface in an absolutely brutal manner.”
That experience opened up a deep wellspring of empathy in her, which continues to shape her art. She is at pains to describe it. “I have this – I don’t know how to call it – an ability to put myself at the heart of the victim, and to look at myself from the outside, as if it really happens to me,” she says. “I research deeply, and at some point I do feel the pain, I have that knowledge and then – unlike a journalist – I try to forget that, and try to establish something that has nothing to do with verbal narration. I think the only word I have for that is a kind of poetry.”
That poetry – she is obsessed, for example, with the absences represented by victims’ shoes and chairs – is never afraid of the most powerful sentiment. A Flor de Piel (which might be translated as “Wearing Your Heart on Your Sleeve”) involved 250,000 rose petals painstakingly stitched together – a repurposing of her mother’s dressmaking skills – to form a room-sized shroud. The brutal inspiration for that ethereal piece were the news reports about a Colombian nurse who was dismembered by paramilitary forces while still alive.
How important, I ask, were those dramatic acts of commemoration at a time when truth and justice were in such scarce supply?
“In a country where violent events become awful reality, it is impossible to make public acts of mourning,” Salcedo says, “because that would mean people literally have to stop working every day. I thought of my work as a necessary creative space for remembrance.”
That space was not always welcomed either by repressive governments or paramilitary groups, who tried to ignore or silence her. With the promise of a ceasefire and peace agreement between the Colombian government and Farc rebels in 2018, Salcedo made perhaps her most hopeful piece, Fragmentos, in which, with the help of 20 female survivors of sexual violence, she used the melted down metal of 37 tonnes of decommissioned guns to create the floor tiles of a new art gallery, and “reflective space”. In defending the peace process she was targeted and threatened by those paramilitaries and criminal gangs who thrived on the fear and chaos.
“In the past,” she says, “there had been peace processes that I did not believe in. But then when this new process happened, I really believed that we were going to achieve peace. I truly believed that it was the first moment of complete hope in my life. I thought of this idea of transforming these tools of death.”
The monument to that process that she created remains, though the peace itself in Colombia has been at best fragile in the years since.
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“I think that Fragmentos is a testament of the fact that Colombians can achieve peace through dialogue,” she says. “We don’t have to keep killing one another. And if we achieved that once, maybe we’ll be able to do it again.”
Salcedo’s artistic community in Bogotá remains a cottage industry of courage and optimism in a population still scarred by conflict. To create her pieces she collaborates with up to 50 artists and artisans at any one time, about half of whom have been with her for 20 years. “Just as I owe everything to the victims who share a testimony with me,” she says “I owe everything to my team. I feel my work is collective work all the time, because if I were alone, it would not exist.”
She has been increasingly hampered in recent years by the debilitating eye condition macular degeneration, which began in her 30s, and which means she now has to work with much reduced vision – though her mind’s eye remains as piercing as ever. Her methods have not changed at all. She reads and listens widely and deeply and talks through ideas with her husband, the novelist Azriel Bibliowicz, who writes about the Jewish immigrant experience in Latin America. And then she starts to draw.
“I like working in extreme detail,” she says, “which really is a little absurd for my condition, but which addresses the delicacy of the human life, of the human condition.” That process of drawing can go on for months while she works towards the definitive idea she is seeking. Her loss of sight has made that process even more deliberate, since she now finds it harder to improvise during the making, and must therefore present her teams with “much more materiality” in the plans she creates. A case in point would be her recent installation, Uprooted, which she sees as a companion piece to her hair house.
Uprooted is an extraordinary dwelling constructed in the gallery of 804 dead trees – though it is a home without doors or windows or proper protection. The initial inspiration for it, Salcedo says, came from watching footage of caravans of mostly Nicaraguan migrants heading for the US border, after the devastation of Hurricane Iota in 2020. The forests they were passing through had been flooded with a storm surge and inundated with mud slides and the soil and sources of fresh water had been contaminated creating “kilometres and kilometres of dead forest”. That apocalyptic scene seeded visions in Salcedo’s mind. “That was maybe the first idea I got to make a piece that related to climate migrants,” she says. “It was the year of the pandemic, and I was walking around climbing mountains in the countryside in Colombia, and I started seeing [more of] these trees. She started drawing prototypes of her dead tree house. The chilling sculpture – one that might become horribly emblematic of our times – took on even greater resonance when Colombia hosted Cop16, the UN conference on biological diversity in October last year. She had the familiar experience of seeing Uprooted’s frames of reference expand before her eyes. What started as a response to a particular migration crisis, took on the shape of something more universal. “As I was finishing the piece,” she says, “I was thinking, this is more for all of us. We are all losing our home, by destroying this planet.” She pauses. When they work, she says, “the pieces all start in a certain specific point, but then they grow to embrace a wide reality”.
Talk of migrant caravans and US borders inevitably leads our conversation back to that other wide reality of 2025, the impending inauguration of the 47th US president and all that implies for those neighbouring countries like Colombia, whose fates have so often been shaped by US policy. How is she approaching that fact?
“It’s unbelievably painful here from every point of view,” she says. “Of course, the absurd, insane rightwing [in Colombia] is quickly picking up on Trump’s victory, and beginning a campaign as virulent and as sick as the American one. And of course as a person from South America to hear all these vile comments that migrants are “poisoning the blood” of America is itself terrible. And as a woman, I really feel like we have been defeated, which is very depressing.”
She has seen so many of these kinds of political crises over the years, I say, how does she keep from despair?
“There is only one answer,” she says, looking me in the eye on screen: “We just have to keep working – harder than ever before.”
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Doris Salcedo will be presented with the art icon award at a special gala celebration at Whitechapel Gallery, London on 3 March
