Doris Salcedo: Third World Identity | Art21 "Exclusive"

Episode #086: In her Bogotá studio, artist Doris Salcedo discusses the stereotypes she faces as a citizen of a Third World country and how she embraces these first-hand experiences of discrimination to inform her art. Shown working alongside her team of assistants, whose collective labor underscores the political messages of her sculptures, Salcedo proposes a more humble role for artists working today.

Doris Salcedos understated sculptures and installations embody the silenced lives of the marginalized, from individual victims of violence to the disempowered of the Third World. Although elegiac in tone, her works are not memorials: Salcedo concretizes absence, oppression, and the gap between the disempowered and powerful. While abstract in form and open to interpretation, her works serve as testimonies on behalf of both victims and perpetrators. Salcedos work reflects a collective effort and close collaboration with a team of architects, engineers, and assistants and—as Salcedo says—with the victims of the senseless and brutal acts to which her work refers.

Learn more about Doris Salcedo: http://www.art21.org/artists/doris-salcedo

VIDEO | Producer: Wesley Miller & Nick Ravich. Interview: Susan Sollins. Camera: Bob Elfstrom. Sound: Ray Day. Editor: Paulo Padilha & Mark Sutton. Artwork Courtesy: Doris Salcedo.

If I'm presenting a proposal and my knowledge as a person from a third world country,

It's not validated, as a knowledge of a first world person.

I think it's a great experience.

And I know what it is, exactly what it is to be discriminated, what it is to face stereotypes.

I know these things, first hand.

I think it is a privilege to come from Colombia,

To come from a country that is at war, because it is like living in a condensed capsule of human experience,

In six months here, I can experience what it would take me 20 years to experience in a first world country.

For me, as identity, third world is enough. I don' want to get into Catholic, female, Colombian...

Third World is enough.

The political aspect of the work relates also to the process of making the work.

We are all learning, we are in this same process. We are discovering things,

We are discussing, we are arguing.

It has to be a collective effort. I do real labor.

Especially for me, coming from the third world, I cannot simply use somebody else's labor.

That's not the way it is. That will destroy their sense of the piece,

If I were working from that perspective.

The role of the artist has been overrated. And I think it should be more humble.

We basically connect elements that are already there, that are already present.

In my case, events that already took place, stories that have not been told that already happened.

And the work of my assistants, ideas that are in books.

So I take all these and I simply connect all that.

I think it's a humbler role.

I am not a solo singer, and my studio, we are a chorus.