ABSTRACT
Between 1992 and 1994, Doris Salcedo produced a series of six works, collectively entitled La Casa Viuda, the ‘widowed house’. La Casa Viuda refers literally and figuratively to the threshold, both in its inception and in its materiality. The works in the series are composite structures, consisting of doorways intersected by fragments of domestic furniture; in La Casa Viuda I, for example, the seat and legs of a chair, in La Casa Viuda II, a section from a wardrobe. These composite structures are further marked by traces of corporeal inhabitation, etched across their surfaces and embedded within their frames: an incision in the top of the wardrobe in La Casa Viuda II is filled with bone, while a bevelled edge at its front yields to a shard of fabric and a small zipper. Thus refashioned, the doorways of La Casa Viuda suggest the possibility of entering or leaving a house, but refuse this by means of strange juxtapositions of scale, elevation and material. Yet the threshold qualities of the series are not diminished by this; the works are determined by an internal exchange between found and facture, a point of demarcation between the ‘given’ nature of domestic objects and the ‘fabrication’ of works of art, that can transform our familiarity with the everyday into an affective encounter with difference. In each work of La Casa Viuda, we are invited to explore a charged seam, to engage bodily with a physical change of state from one material to another. The negated doorways of the works are thus reconfigured as threshold states of sensory transformation.
