Doris Salcedo at the Palacio de Cristal

Palimpsesto (Palimpsest) is the title of the intervention by Doris Salcedo (Bogota, 1958) at the Palacio de Cristal in Madrid, Spain. The exhibition is curated by Soledad Liaño in collaboration with White Cube and the Fundación Sorigué. Thematically, Salcedo appropriates social and political circumstances and, with a critical gaze, performs spatial interventions that become stages for reflection. Although her artistic discourse has mainly focused on very painful and highly repressed political events in Colombia, on this occasion she approaches the global issue of the millions of persons drowned in the Mediterranean Sea and the Atlantic Ocean during the last twenty years as they attempted to escape from violence-ridden countries with the hope of finding a better life somewhere else. Using a complex hydraulic system, Salcedo temporary and intermittently writes with drops of water the names of some of the persons who died under those circumstances.