MF: Furniture figures prominently in your oeuvre: wooden wardrobes with shirts and dresses embedded in concrete showing through the glass doors; the empty bedframe; dressers whose drawers are cemented shut. You arrange these pieces in different configurations depending on the exhibit space.

DS: It is only in the particular space that the viewer can establish a relationship with the image I present. Only in the viewer’s silent contemplation can some aspect of the victims’ experience emerge.

For this reason, I consider all of my pieces incomplete when they leave the studio. They are finished when they are placed in a particular site. Then the exhibit closes, and the pieces can be re-assembled in different spaces. There is no closure on this level.

MF: There is a remarkable tension in your work between the notion of shared public space and a strong sense of displacement. You have bunched these pieces together in cavernous sites (including a cathedral), strewn them around galleries in lonely formations, situated them to block doorways and passageways.

DS: My task is to articulate the different elements that have been given to me by the individuals who so generously tell me their stories. That is why I attempt to put myself in the victim’s place and to work with the materials that this person might have had within reach. I then elaborate those materials with gestures related to the extreme experience of the victim. The experience of these marginal individuals is invisible to the majority of the population, which prefers to ignore what is happening; for this reason the spatial location is directly related to the precarious position these individuals occupy in our society.

As we were saying earlier, I call attention to the life that was destroyed, that is being destroyed as we speak. I do this in part by stripping objects of their function, by shifting their context.

MF: One of your most extraordinary--perhaps I should say extreme--pieces is The Orphan’s Tunic, originally inspired by your interview with a six-year-old girl whose mother was murdered before her eyes. For days, according to your account, this child refused to change out of the dress she was wearing when it happened, a dress her mother had made for her. The work in question is, of all surprising things, a wooden table, whose surface glows, as though bathed in moonlight. On close inspection, we see that the surface is covered by a thin membrane of white silk that falls unevenly around the table’s legs. The wooden surface is punctured in many places; the strands of silk and human hair are literally sewn into this network of tiny wounds. You have taken the narrative of this event, which centers on the child’s dress, and expanded it with the table to encompass a whole spectrum of family togetherness. The workmanship is itself a ritual of grief. It is so painstaking, so difficult, that I can’t help but think of penitence. Is that an exaggeration?

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