As the world turns toward another fractured year, Doris Salcedo, the Colombian artist, is at work trying to fathom how to create a house out of human hair. Salcedo, 65, has long made herself a channel of collective trauma, her art expressing profound anger at political crimes and atrocities at home and abroad – as well as creating imaginative spaces for mourning. Her hair project, she says, comes in response to what she has come to think of as “domicide”: the calculated bombing and destruction of places that people call home.
“Most of my work is a response of some kind to war,” she says. “And we have all witnessed – of course for decades in Colombia, but also now in Ukraine and Syria and Sudan and in Gaza – this destruction of houses for the sole purpose of escalating human suffering. In Gaza some people have rebuilt their houses several times and seen them destroyed again. So I was thinking, how does it feel to be somewhere where there are no bricks, no concrete, no wood, absolutely nothing you can build with? And I thought: OK, it’s like a spider, wanting to construct something from inside. So I’m trying to make a gigantic spider web house out of human hair. And on top of being made out of human hair, it’s being ripped apart.”
