Containment in Doris Salcedo’s Atrabiliarios

Abstract

Doris Salcedo’s Atrabiliarios is a widely revered installation, one of the first to bring the artist to an international stage in the early 1990s. Yet virtually no critical account of her work provides a comprehensive and nuanced history of the context that instantiated it. This article presents an entirely new art historical investigation of Atrabiliarios read through the context of the Cold War in Colombia. I argue Salcedo’s installation can be understood as a critique of the logic of Cold War containment, alluding to US influence on the Colombian conflict. I argue that Salcedo is intentionally attempting to disrupt a safe distance between a perceived barbaric other of Colombia and the ‘civilised’ subjects of the global north. The artist manipulated the space of the exhibition so that, through her work, viewers are placed in close relation to the indices of those already met with violence and pervasive indifference.