Doris Salcedo’s A Flor de Piel undulated across the floor, evoking conflicting feelings of awe and dissonance. A room-sized shroud composed entirely of preserved rose petals (a process that effectively renders them halfway between dead and alive) and then sutured together by hand, A Flor de Piel served as a funerary offering to a Columbian nurse who was kidnapped and tortured to death. The literal translation for the Spanish idiom a flor de piel is “the flower of ones’ skin” – the softest part of the body, the most sensitive. The closest we can come to it in English is the phrase “to wear one’s heart on one’s sleeve.”
Salcedo’s work focuses in on the injustices and suffering of modern day life – ones rooted in colonialism and racism. Her work pokes fingers at the cracks that we wish had stayed hidden, at the trauma left behind by unexplained absences. As someone who emigrated from the Philippines at a young age, I’ve often wondered if it is possible to make work that appropriately highlights and illustrates these kinds of experiences. Seeing Salcedo’s work in person has convinced me of that.