Silent witnesses: Doris Salcedo and Blanchot

Doris Salcedo’s work calls towards the conjuring of absent testimony and silent witnesses. Across a broad range of works, Salcedo evokes the unwitnessed deaths of thousands of ‘missing’ Columbian peoples who disappeared in the early 21^st century. This paper explores how the work of Maurice Blanchot – in particular The Instant of My Death (1994) – can help us understand the deconstruction of witnessing and testimony in Salcedo’s works Plegaria Muda (2008-10) and A Flor de Piel (2012). In both works Salcedo evokes the silent witness, a spectre (Derrida, 1996) that calls forth a responsibility to mourn the missing. This paper considers how Salcedo’s conjuring of silence locates testimony as a work in continual opposition to both truth and fiction, and in so doing proposes a new location of witnessing that demands a new approach to testimony.