At the Site of State Violence: Doris Salcedo’s and Julieta Hanono’s Memorial Aesthetics

Abstract

Lori Cole is a PhD candi date in the Department of Comparative Literature at New York University and a Joan Tisch Teaching Fellow at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Her research focuses on the construction of transatlantic avant-garde communities in print. She is also an art critic and transla tor and has published work in PMLA, Artforum, and the Journal of Surrealism and the Americas. WHILE ALL PUBLIC ART HAS THE CAPACITY TO COM memorate historical events, much post-dictatorial memorial art in Latin America challenges the traditional temporal and physical frameworks characteristic of public monuments. Artists such as the Colombian Juan Manuel Echavarria, Uruguayan Luis Camnitzer, Argentine Nicolas Guagnini, or the Mexican Teresa Margolles, confront the challenge of representing and alluding to violence without stylizing it.1 In this essay I focus specifically on projects by the Colombian Doris Salcedo and Argentine Julieta Hanono, two contemporary artists whose work maps the bodies of victims lost to state-dictated violence onto the actual spaces that contained the historical traumas. Examining Salcedos Noviembre 6y 7, a memorial to the 1985 victims of the siege on the Palace of Justice and the ensuing massacre in Bogota, and Hanono's Elpozo, a video installation depicting the space where the artist was imprisoned for two years as a victim of the Argentine military secret police during the Videla dicta torship, I reflect on how these artists memorialize violence through a phenomenological relationship to site that at once centralizes the absent body and invites viewers to participate in a collective historical reflection.