MF: Shoes are a dominant element in the series you call Atrabiliarios, an archaic Spanish word whose Latin roots, atra bilis, combine profound mourning with bile, or rage. You `buried’ the shoes, many of which lack their mate, in wall niches, which you then covered with translucent animal fiber and closed with surgical thread. The process itself, one of humble care and profound homage, calls up ancient customs; the effect on the viewer is one of searing loss. The shoes are at once homely and familiar, but because they are sealed off and their outlines are indistinct, they seem to be fading before our eyes into another realm.

DS: It is more and more difficult to find the diffuse boundary between the intimate and the political. The grief of the relatives of desaparecidos—like all grief—is of an intimate nature, but when the essence of these events is political, I believe the society must acknowledge it. I am interested in showing that social injury, its collective character.

The direct witness to forced disappearance is not here, cannot tell us his experience. My work is about the impossibility of seeing, of knowing, and of communicating.

So to return to your comment--yes, shoes are an important image of the Holocaust, as you must know. The history is different, but the resonance is similar.

MF: You’re referring to the shoes in Yad Vashem.

DS: Yes.

MF: In La casa viuda [The Widowed House, 1992-94] we see how pervasively intimate and domestic the violence has become. In La casa viuda I, a found door stands alone; pushed against it is a small, low, distressed wooden table, partially wrapped in fragments of lacey white cloth--doily? tablecloth? curtain? dress? nightgown? glove? The piece calls up absence and wreckage and bandaging (even surgery, owing to prominent stitching), but it also makes a declaration: There was a whole gregarious family living here, they received their friends with style and elegance. The piece is extremely succinct, yet it hits you with many associations all at once.

DS: This work refers to forced displacement. The displaced person is an extreme and paradigmatic figure for our epoch, the figure who has broken the connection to his birthplace and so lacks a place of his own. He is the immigrant no one wants to be close to, who is rejected by everyone.

Humans are spatial beings, we need a place to eat, a place to write, to think, etc. It is impossible to disassociate space from human experience. The Casa Viuda [The Widowed House] series refers to those millions of human beings who have no space.

I am also interested in the image of the artist as a displaced person. An artist does not occupy a central place in his work, the center is inhabited by the experience of another being.

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