DS: It goes back to what I was saying earlier. I work from a profound sense of my own limitations, and also from the limits imposed on the person who inhabits the center of the work.

The gesture on which that image is constructed is particularly difficult; it isn’t penitence in the religious or judicial sense, it is the most difficult and useless work that I could do on the surface of the tables. What interested me was the obsessive elaboration of these images, the exaggerated, limitless waste that this implies. And yet, the image is insignificant in the face of the waste of human lives.

MF: Your process is marked by extensive reading—particularly in poetry, philosophy, and what is often called the Literature of Disaster. Among the authors you frequently mention are Bataille, Primo Levi, Paul Celan, Emmanuel Levinas. Does this intense immersion in reading—which you seem to do after your interviews and before you actually begin to construct—provide you with a kind of distancing device? I’m fascinated that none of your interviewees has ever recognized him- or herself in your constructions.

DS: I am constantly citing. I believe it is essential to show the origins of some of the ideas in my work. For that reason, in my exhibition catalogues, there are always sections dedicated especially to quotations (for example, in the New Museum catalogue published by Phaidon).

The artist’s job, as I understand it, is quite humble. It isn’t that of creator, playing God, it means being a witness, not only to the events that surround us, but also to contemporary thought. The work of the artist is to assemble different elements--events, thought, other works of art—in order to create an image.

MF: Internationally you are by far the most promiment Colombian artist of your generation. Yet your working life is exceedingly private, even solitary (except for your studio collaborators).

DS: I have chosen to live in a state of displacement, as an outsider. This is essential to my work. It is the only way to maintain a critical distance from the society in which and for which I am working.

MF: But you did spearhead a landmark public art gesture to honor Jaime Garzón, a humorist and media figure who was slain by the paramilitaries in August 1999.

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