With this early work from one of the artist’s most widely exhibited series, Doris Salcedo offers a haunting testimonial to loss and the unresolved afterlives of the disappeared. In Atrabiliarios (1993), she arranges well-worn shoes within six wall recesses, each space veiled by a taut skin of cow bladder stitched to the wall along its edges with surgical thread. Conceived in 1991 in response to the widespread disappearances of civilians amid the state and paramilitary violence that marked Colombia’s internal conflict, this body of work exemplifies Salcedo’s practice of political archaeology: exhuming the remnants of violence to shape charged sites of remembrance and mourning.

Much of Salcedo’s early work is characterised by a visceral materiality through which the absent body is made present. Among the organic matter, found clothing and furniture that populate her assemblages, shoes provide a singularly poignant proxy for the body. As cultural theorist Mieke Bal observes, shoes are ‘among the most gripping traces of human presence’: they ‘have been worn and worn out, have taken the shape of the individual foot, and supported those walking the earth in search of a life’ (Mieke Bal, ‘Earth Aches: The Aesthetics of the Cut’, in Doris Salcedo: Shibboleth, Tate Publishing, London, 2007, p.46). What begins as an object of familiarity thus becomes a transcript of a life lived – and, for Salcedo, a signifier of a life lost. Propelled by an urgency to preserve what remains, her material strategies in Atrabiliarios enact a ritual of entombment, transforming the work itself into a reliquary.

As part of her extensive research and interview process, Salcedo received some shoes from the loved ones of victims who had disappeared; others, she has noted, she selected 'intuitively' (quoted in Mary Schneider Enriquez, The Materiality of Mourning, exh. cat., Harvard Art Museums and Yale University Press, London, 2016, p.69). Though ‘found’ by the artist, the shoes powerfully attest to what has been lost: of the six niches that comprise Atrabiliarios, some hold pairs while others cradle a solitary shoe, its counterpart absent. Seen only dimly through the work’s membrane, the shoes are sequestered from full view. The vantage thus shifts to that of the bereaved, with the work itself taking on the quality of a memory – distant, spectral, and on the verge of being lost to time. Unlike her later, expansive installation, Palimpsest (2013–17), in which the names of the dead flicker briefly into view, the victims in Atrabiliarios remain unnamed.

Compelled by what she describes as an ‘obsessive need to render visible the experiences of the most vulnerable and most anonymous victims of political violence’, Salcedo locates her practice at ‘a fragile threshold […] filled with impossible contradictions that will remain unsettled’ (quoted in The Materiality of Mourning, p.xvii). These contradictions are present not only in the shoes themselves, but also in the crude, handwrought sutures with which Salcedo seals them away – gestures that intimate repair and healing, while simultaneously reinscribing the violence they draw into view. Jill Bennett aptly describes the presence of the human in Salcedo’s work as ‘fugitive’ rather than ‘figural’: the body is represented not in the traditional sense but surfaces obliquely, as an absence that haunts the material and unsettles its status as object (quoted in The Materiality of Mourning, p.70).

Atrabiliarios communicates, on an intimate scale, the affective power associated with Salcedo’s large-scale museum installations. Works from the series have featured prominently as part of the artist’s major solo exhibitions, including those held at Fondation Beyeler, Basel, in 2023, and the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, in 2015, which travelled to Pérez Art Museum Miami and Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. Works from Salcedo’s ‘Atrabiliarios’ series reside in major museum collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, California; Tate, London; and Moderna Museet, Stockholm; among others.