A palimpsest is a writing erased and replaced by another. Sometimes, perhaps
all too often, our lives become incarnated palimpsests thanks to the prevailing
biopolitics, which refers not only to the government of the living, but also to
the multiple practices of dying and disappearing. Can art teach us to create
new spaces of co-habitation with our essential ghosts, with those who refuse
to abandon us despite everything? In this article we address the work entitled
Palimpsesto, in which the Colombian artist Doris Salcedo (Bogotá, 1958),
makes visible one of the most ignominious events in our recent history: the
deaths of thousands of people in the Mediterranean due to indifference and,
on occasions, the complicity—conscious or unconscious—of a desensitized
European society, closed in on itself. In Palimpsesto, the artist creates a space
where those absences are permanently present in absentia. However,
Salcedo’s art goes beyond testimony and representation: the tears that flow
from the earth itself, outlining on the ground the names of women and
men who drowned while fleeing war, reveal not only the need to name those
who are no longer with us, but could lay the foundations to erect a kind of
divinology (Meillassoux, “Deuil à venir” 105) through which new ties and
forms of dwelling would be built, beyond interested
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