Widowhood time. Lived experience and political agency in The Widow House and Untitled Furniture by Doris Salcedo

Abstract

This text proposes that, through an analysis of the works of Doris Salcedo, The Widow House and Untitled Furniture, it is possible to approach the expression of the lived experience of the victims of the armed conflict, their sensations and states of fragility and vulnerability. In particular, the furniture in these two series by Salcedo reveal, through their objecthood, intertextuality and situationality, the political agency of the work of art that takes place through the way in which it brings together the feeling and expression of pain. and the feeling of helplessness that goes through a life affected by violence. By putting these works in dialogue with critical concepts and some literary approaches to the victims of violence, the possibility emerges of interpreting the condition of widowhood as a characteristic feature of the feeling expressed by the work that collapses time and forces the viewer to participate in the spectral condition of pain that materializes the poetics of the object in the work.