Doris Sacedo’s Uninhabitable 'La Casa Viuda'

"La Casa Viuda" (translated "widowed house," 1992-1995), is a widely celebrated series by contemporary Colombian sculptor, Doris Salcedo. The series evoked domestic spaces that were radically disrupted, disturbed and reconfigured into uninhabitable locales. Her work references the Colombian armed conflict from the 1960s to date which left one of the largest populations of internally displaced people in the world, totaling 7 million and hundreds of thousands killed or disappeared. Women who most often remain the survivors are forced to build anew in impoverished areas, are frequently stigmatized racially and socially, and remain underrecognized by Colombian society and the world at large. This paper examines how Salcedo asks that these women be regarded as worthy of empathy. She does so by working to make them visible to global audiences unfamiliar with her home conflict; seldom does she exhibit in Colombia. Yet while Salcedo attempts to witness how women negotiate violence, US and European art historical discourse failed to attend to the specificity of their lives in Colombia. Salcedo’s work is rarely placed within a comprehensive contextualization of her homeland or the perspective of its art historians. As her work found home in the global north, I argue that those who promoted it did so to display their sympathies to global violence. Yet they also translated that violence as “universal,” illustrating that such sympathies lacked content and reference to women’s experiences in Colombia. Thus, like those she seeks to make visible, the specific violence Salcedo speaks to is left without a home.