“Well, my work is based not on my experience but on somebody else’s experience. I would like to reflect a little bit on the etymology of the word experience: it comes from the Latin word experiri, which means to test or to prove and from the Latin word periri, which means peril and danger and also from the Indo-European root per, which means going across. So experience means going across danger.
So my work is about somebody else’s experience, literally defined. That’s where you get the connection with political violence, that’s where you get the connection with war. And that’s what really interests me”
Doris Salcedo
Bogodá, Columbia, 1958