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DS:
Yes, though it’s important to say that this was a communal
act, so I don’t consider it part of my oeuvre. And as artists
we were responding, in part, to a spontaneous popular action: on
the wall opposite Garzón’s house, people immediately
started putting up notes and messages to express their rage and
sorrow. On a 150-metre stretch of wall, we hung 5,000 roses blossoms
down, and let them wither. A fragile, ephemeral site of memory.
There were three different events: the first took place a week after
his death; the second a month later; and the third on the one-year
anniversary. For the last event, we had 45,000 roses, and with Garzón’s
brother and sister, we walked the exact route that he had driven
on his final day. We made a line of roses that was four-and-a-half
kilometres long, until we reached the spot where he was murdered.
Garzón, who was famous for his caricatures of Colombian social
types, was emblematic. We registered the grief and loss that engulfs
our entire country.
MF: The action became a model.
DS: Yes, a little later when a professor was killed at the
national university, students covered a university wall with roses.
MF: Such pieces are clearly about remembrance, but on the
whole I think that the theme of memory has been over-applied to
your work.
DS: I think that may be right. A country like Colombia that
has endured an armed conflict for more than forty years needs a
strange mix of memory and oblivion. For this reason the kind of
memory that most interests me is Forgetful Memory, by which I mean
memory that be mediated, that can evolve, that is capable of establishing
distance, and not getting locked in to a vicious circle of useless
vengeance.
MF: When I stand in one of your installations, what I feel
most strongly is the power of that particular space, and the issues
(responsibilities) that arise from my own presence there. It is
a very immediate rush of association, emotion, and physical sensation.
Your installations force the viewer to engage in hard acts of translation—a
process that makes us highly conscious of the present moment.
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