Doris Salcedo, the artist who melted the FARC’s weapons: ‘Goya strips war of its heroic character’

Colombia continues to suffer the horrors of its many forms of violence. Nearly 10 years after the peace agreement with Colombia’s Revolutionary Armed Forces (FARC), the country is entering a new political chapter, with a new government that has closed the door on any further attempts at dialogue.

Against that backdrop, The Disasters of War, Francisco de Goya’s series of prints depicting the victims of conflict, will go on display from September 5 at Fragmentos, the counter-monument in Bogotá’s historic center. This important space of art and memory was built from the melted-down rifles of the now-defunct FARC and was conceived by Doris Salcedo, one of the most acclaimed Latin American visual artists in the world.

The exhibition brings together the complete series of 80 prints, produced between 1810 and 1820, in which Goya depicts the most devastating consequences of Napoleon’s invasion of Spain and the Peninsular War. The prints will be accompanied through January 17 of next year by seven poems from authors from different countries. Three collective actions focused on memory and remembrance will also take place over the coming months.

“Goya gives us a profound lesson about what war is. First, he strips it of any heroic character; second, he completely removes its nationalist dimension. He simply shows that war is pure brutality, that it is ignorance, and that all it brings is death,” Salcedo explains.

“He shows us rape, forced displacement, extrajudicial executions, torture, impalement, famine,” says the renowned Colombian artist. “He also shows the return of ignorance, because the Inquisition comes back; the violence that religion inflicts on ordinary people. We see all of these elements reflected absolutely in Colombia today,” she adds, speaking of the enduring relevance of The Disasters of War.

In her view, many of those scenes directly evoke the horrors of Colombia’s own armed conflict, including massacres such as El Salado, carried out by paramilitaries in 2000.

“Fragmentos represents a possibility for Colombians: the possibility of ending conflicts without killing one another, without bloodshed, without firing a single bullet. It represents the possibility of agreement, of dialogue, of talking things through, of understanding each other as rational human beings,” Salcedo reflects. “What we wanted to do by juxtaposing Fragmentos with this extraordinary work by Goya was to show Colombians the choices before us. We can either continue down the path of war, ignorance, religion, class divisions, everything that Goya shows us, or we can choose to build a social pact that leads us toward a peaceful and livable life in community for everyone.”

The exhibition arrives at a delicate moment. Abelardo de la Espriella has not yet completed his first month as Colombia’s president, but he is already promising a return to tough-on-crime security policies, ruling out any peace negotiations and sharply criticizing the institutions created under the accord with the FARC. He has also announced raids against undocumented migrants, spoken of “gutting” the left, though he later softened those remarks, and has repeatedly promoted a “cultural battle” that encompasses, among many other fronts, the Culture Ministry itself.

With its enormous symbolic weight, Fragmentos is itself a product of the peace agreement signed at the end of 2016. The Goya exhibition reaffirms the mission for which it was conceived: a space dedicated to the victims of the many forms of violence that have scarred Colombia. It was built from the melted metal of 37 tons of weapons surrendered by former FARC combatants. Its floor is made up of 1,300 metal plates hammered into shape by women who suffered sexual violence during the armed conflict. Housed in a colonial-era building just steps from the Casa de Nariño, the presidential palace, it was also envisioned as a museum that, for each year of the conflict and over a span of more than half a century, would host exhibitions by Colombian and international artists.

Salcedo has long been deeply committed to the peace accord, as well as to the Truth Commission, which delivered its final report in 2022. On more than one occasion, she has transformed Bogotá’s Plaza de Bolívar, the country’s political heart, which is only a few blocks from Fragmentos. There she installed Quebrantos, an intervention denouncing Colombian society’s growing indifference to the murder of social leaders. The square was also the site of Sumando ausencias, a vast white shroud stitched together with seven miles of thread by 10,000 people, giving voice to victims amid public calls to salvage the peace accord after the plebiscite in which the original agreement was narrowly rejected. Through her work, Salcedo has insisted time and again that Colombians are not condemned to yet another cycle of violence.

With a long list of international awards to her name, ranging from Spain’s Velázquez Prize to the Nasher Prize in the United States and the Nomura Award in Japan, Salcedo has achieved worldwide acclaim. Her work includes Shibboleth, the monumental crack that split the floor of London’s Tate Modern, exhibitions at New York’s MoMA and Paris’s Centre Pompidou, and Palimpsesto at Madrid’s Crystal Palace, a tribute to migrants who died at sea.

What also stands out in The Disasters of War, Salcedo notes, is the sheer number of images depicting migrants and forced displacement. Colombia is the principal destination for migrants fleeing neighboring Venezuela, and one of the poems accompanying the prints is Home by Warsan Shire. “You have to understand / that no one puts their children in a boat / unless the water is safer than the land,” it reads.

“These cultural battles are clearly driving us toward violence,” Salcedo laments. “I invite people to look carefully at the exhibition and reflect on each of these images, in which Goya shows us how distressing the return of the Inquisition was for him, which also investigated him personally, and how terrible it was for Spain. Let us hope that artists in Colombia do not meet the same fate. Let’s leave that in the past. Let us trust that there will be openness and an understanding that culture is about knowledge and an open-minded view of what a society is.”

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