You enter a gallery expecting the art to come get you. You walk toward the giant abstract Clyfford Still or Kara Walker’s black silhouettes and gradually, you situate yourself and move your eyes across the surface—zooming in and out, staring at lines, colors, textures. But when you enter Doris Salcedo’s “Fragmentos,” you enter a void. There’s nothing on the white walls. You know the art is at your feet, but you still look ahead for something. You move around on top of the installation: jaggedly-textured slabs of steel, with a range of grays reflecting the cool mountain light of Bogotá.

*

“There is nothing in this world as invisible as a monument,” Robert Musil wrote, believing that if you saw the same block of cement turned to monument enough times, you would not see it anymore. Was he thinking of the figures of old royalty in Vienna? Cement men on horses with greenish bronze plaques at their bases? Instead of making visible what has, after too many sightings, become invisible, Salcedo does something else: she gives you something nearly invisible. There is nothing familiar. No easy plaque. Nothing feels resolved. The way Salcedo buries a history of violence in square slabs that you walk across, feeling something strange under your feet, goes right to the heart of Musil’s worry that the violence of the past is invisible—lost in the materials of the city, just old data from the nightly news. So that the only way for you to see it—to really see it, and maybe even then you cannot—is to close your eyes and palpitate it.

*

The traditional war monument is a soldier on a horse with a rifle. What if you turned him into a flat surface with no discernable image of war? Doris Salcedo melted thirty-seven tons of rifles into slabs. They arrived at her Bogotá studio in military trucks, after the peace ceremonies where thirteen thousand guerrillas placed their rifles on tables and shook hands with UN inspectors in blue vests and government officials in white shirts and the national anthem played. It was 2016.

*

“Fragmentos” is about death. Its surfaces are violent. They are turbulent. They are scarred and have been hacked at with hammers.

*

“Fragmentos” is a cenotaph. The bodies are elsewhere or nowhere. They are in mass graves in the mountains, never to be found. They have been dismembered and tossed into rivers. They have been carried off by mothers and widows who cremated them. There are very few monuments in the small towns where the atrocities occurred. A mural here. A white cross there. A name etched in cement. “A crying room,” the mayor of Turbo said disparagingly when he visited the Museum of Memory in Pueblo Bello. “Un lloradero.” The bodies are mostly memories in someone’s head. Often, they are a story that people are not allowed to tell aloud because someone could be listening, and silence is the law in violent places.

*

“Fragmentos” is not for the heroes of a war that did not really have any. It is a cenotaph for my friend Enilda’s father Samuel who was gunned down on a dirt road, in a field of bananas in 1995 while driving to work. His killers were ex-guerrillas turned paramilitaries. Their ideology was money. Enilda’s tall, lanky, cowboy nephew—who wears a black Compton hat because he’s also a rapper—carries his grandfather’s name, and in this way is a monument to him. Enilda’s brother Carlos Mario has his father’s name tattooed in blue-black cursive across his inner wrist. Her brother Ariznel comes walking across the family farm and Enilda sees in his stride her father’s presence and catches her breath. Most monuments are deep in the mind. They are not in public squares. They are private.

*

Salcedo’s “Fragmentos” is permanently exhibited in a gallery just south of the center of Bogotá—buried in the shadow of the presidential palace, so that the streets leading to it are cut off by sawhorses and police with rifles who make you walk a circuitous route. It’s on the threshold between the opulent northern and humble southern neighborhoods. It’s not a place to be after dark. There’s little foot traffic here. Maybe that’s okay, too. You have to work to get here.

*

Enilda and I are making a documentary about her father’s murder and how men with guns that were not yet melted for monuments stole his land. The documentary, a series of landscapes and humans talking, will be a monument. If we put it on YouTube it will perhaps last forever. Her father was not a head of state or a famous general. He was not Che Guevara. Maybe in that he was just a man—a farmer, a womanizer, a homesteader, a hunter, a lover of music and parties, and a believer in the education of his children—it will be an anti-monument. Our documentary is built of data. We will not use limestone or granite. We show the road where he was killed, which is a beige dirt line through bright green banana trees that cover what used to be Enilda’s family’s farm. “There, that was a soccer field,” her brother Eduardo says, as we drive past it. “That was a worker camp.” He walks into a field of bananas and looks at the ground for any sign of his parents’ house and finds nothing.

*

Three times I walked thirty-four streets south through Bogotá’s heart to see Salcedo’s “Fragmentos,” and finally gained entrance on my third try. The first time, the gallery was closed for no reason; the second time, for a renovation. Bogotá is built on a grid. For some Bogotanos, south of Avenida 72 is forbidden for its danger. For others, it’s Avenida 26. For the audacious, Avenida 19 is the final line. The closer you get to zero, the closer you get to your fear. The closer you get to “Fragmentos” on Calle 6b. Zero street does not exist. After Calle 1, you get to Calle 1 South, and here the numbers rise again in the opposite direction.

*

To walk in a banana field is to enter a tunnel formed by cables held aloft by metal arches. Because banana trees are broad-leafed and create shade, they are planted in lines and spaced so that one doesn’t steal the other’s light. Top-heavy with their bunches of fruit and huge leaves, they easily collapse in the wind—especially in the dry season—so to enter this tunnel is to walk through a web of yellow, thin, strong rope that is slanted, staked down, or tied to other plants. In this way all the plants are connected in a complex struggle against gravity.

*

Enilda and I met twenty years ago at a wedding in Bogotá, around the time the government stopped negotiating peace with the guerrillas. Someone set a plate of marijuana cookies on the buffet and only told some people. Late that night, talking with Enilda in the kitchen—the first of a thousand conversations, so intense it was as if we were swimming in the ocean in a storm while talking—I thought I had malaria or some other infection that was making the kitchen explode with electricity and sound. She was from Urabá, a pocket of land in northwestern Colombia, near Panamá. A flat valley where bananas grew surrounded by mountains. A guerrilla stronghold terrorized and cleansed by paramilitaries. Another woman at the party joked that everyone who went there ended up falling in love and getting pregnant, even herself. A place of love and violence, I thought, and that was all I knew about Urabá for a time.

*

Some blame the mountains for the war in Colombia. There is an eastern, central, and western range. In each you will find armed groups, drug laboratories, routes north—tiny communities lorded over by men in camouflage with armbands, or in street clothes with guns. The roads are often falling apart and impossible to maintain. This means avalanches block routes for weeks. This means the guerrillas could attack a road or town and hide in the mountains and never be found.

*

The war could last over fifty years.

*

You know it is six p.m. in Colombia when the national anthem plays on every single radio station. You hear it on the bus during rush hour traffic or standing in line at the grocery store. It’s supposed to unify a divided country.

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Salcedo created “Fragmentos” as an anti-monument to the civil war, which theoretically ended when the guerrillas surrendered in 2016. The war has other guises now. There are new armbands, acronyms, and camouflage, but basically the same young men with guns. Their ideology is still money. Few combatants—and Salcedo knows this—ever surrender for good because violence pays when nothing else does, when that’s what you know how to do and you were born poor.

*

For example, recently my friend Raúl—who works for the UN—visited Ituango, a remote indigenous village in Antioquia that’s being disputed by guerrilla dissidents and paramilitaries. Raúl rode ten hours by mule into the mountains, to convince three hundred paramilitaries to respect the Geneva rules of war. At a checkpoint, men with assault rifles halted Raúl but his mule did not obey—so down the hill he went, waiting to be shot in the back yelling, “¡Somos imparciales! ¡Somos imparciales!” We are impartial! We are impartial! The men just laughed at him in his blue vest. After three days in Ituango, a member of Raúl’s team suffered a panic attack and they all had to leave ahead of schedule.

*

Sight is the dominant sense for observing art, as you are generally not allowed to touch sculptures or paintings. Salcedo subverts this. She places you in a metallic landscape that is monochrome, with slabs of gray steel reflecting light in the way that parts of guns do. You can squat and touch the art. If you pay attention to your feet, you begin to feel that you are blind, moving through the night.

*

Enilda has dark curly hair, a slight gap in her teeth, and an electric gaze that bathes you in a floodlight of curiosity or cuts through you immediately if you are false. She speaks breathlessly. She is often as astounded as I am at what she says. When it comes time to interview her for the documentary, we sit near the balcony of her apartment in Apartadó and even after all these years of knowing her, I am in awe. She stitches one piece of history to another in her life, remembering everything, unafraid to look right at the most painful moments. We are filming with iPhones that keep running out of storage. The room goes dark and cools down after a hot day. She still has more to say.

*

Enilda’s father had intended to have one more son before calling it quits. He had her instead. She became the star of the family. He danced with her before others at parties, and rescued her from her mother’s beatings. He paid for her to study at Instituto Unibán, alongside the progeny of the wealthy banana planters who worried that she, a black girl, would be eating off the same plates as their children. Her father told her she would someday be the face of the family—and when your father favors you above your twenty siblings, all competing for his affection, you start to believe him. She used to wander the streets of Apartadó alone at night and run into him out drinking, and they would walk home together. After his murder, she set out walking despite the war, hoping to find him again.

*

“After so much crying and feeling anguish from what was happening, I collapsed,” Enilda says in the documentary, about grieving the loss of her father. “For a moment I lost consciousness. What it meant to bear that pain was to split [my life] in half […] you feel like you don’t have a floor anymore, that you don’t have a roof anymore, that you are there in the open, alone, totally helpless. And then you have to rebuild yourself […] That’s what I believe life has been about from then on: an entire path to give meaning to that event, in my life but also in the life of my family; in the life, let’s say it, of this whole territory.”

*

In “Fragmentos” no one is “encañado,” or in the sights of a gun. But Salcedo gives you silence and space to think about all the people who had these rifles pointed at them. “Los encañados,” let’s call them. “Los encañados” is everybody in a war zone. Shopkeepers, massage therapists, dentists, mayors, contractors, truck drivers, cattle ranchers, banana workers, musicians, teachers, sex workers, politicians, factory workers, coffee producers, miners, fruit pickers, homeowners.

*

It’s nice to have a monument where no one points a rifle at you.

*

At age seven, Enilda was awoken in the middle of the night and found herself “encañada.” A guerrilla had climbed through her window and was in her bed. He asked her where her father kept his guns. He dragged her down the hallway to where her father lay beaten in a pool of blood and her brothers and sisters sat, humiliated, against the wall. A few months later, guerrillas killed Enilda’s brother Ananías, and her family received a twenty-four hour notice to leave their farm. That night, Enilda’s older sister Neli says, they had been watching Alf—an American sitcom about a furry alien who lives a domestic life with a white suburban family—when they heard the rattle of spray paint cans: the guerrillas were painting threats on the side of their house. Then came a gunshot and Ananías screaming.

*

If you fly from Bogotá to Medellín, you cross green mountains in the states of Cundinamarca, Tolima, and Antioquia. You see villages on ridges and in valleys that seem beautiful. Everyone here is paying “la vacuna.” Not just to dissident guerrillas but to traffickers and paramilitaries. Often, it’s a teenager with pimples and a baseball cap at your door who says, “I am here to charge the security fee.”

*

Look down at the art. Feel the steel with your feet.

*

As a child, Enilda thought the guerrillas were monsters who lurked in the night, masked, armed, stinky—but as she grew older, she realized they were just men, neighbors, and workers who smiled at her during the day and stood with bowed heads, friendly, joking around with her father each morning as he did “el reparto,” or the distribution of the day’s labor. These were the same men who danced at the parties and ate big cuts of grilled beef and fried plantains. They were men known to the family—intimate with, though separate from, it. They were not the Other. In our documentary, Neli says she always smelled the guerillas before she could see them, because they buried their camouflage in the fields and never washed it. One night, a guerrilla put a gun to her temple and twisted the barrel into her eye. When she gets nervous, she laughs, so he twisted harder. Another guerrilla told him to stop, that her laughing was compulsive. The guerrilla switched to her other temple and left her with two black eyes, but she kept laughing.

*

Look at the metal floor. Scrape your feet on the ridges. Take off your shoes to really feel it, the way someone exiled from their home might return and take off their shoes to feel it again. But this is not a home. It’s an anti-monument and an anti-home.

*

Salcedo believes if you look right at violence, you see nothing. It’s too noisy. “Fragmentos” is a silent place, yet so near the center of Bogotá that is never quiet. The center is an “hervidero”—a place where everything is boiling, a place to hustle and sell—not far from San Andresito, the largest black market in the country. You detour around the police at the presidential palace and walk uphill into la Candelaria. You encounter stray dogs and colonial aqueducts. The doorways are cut deep into thick walls of rammed earth and the roofs are made of red adobe. This is the original city the Spanish built in the seventeenth century. Because Bogotá is eight thousand feet above sea level, they had to carry everything on mules up from the jungle onto this cold mountain.

*

Salcedo lives a cushy life in Bogotá, but she looks outward. She travels and listens to the stories of those who have survived the war. She has made sculptures by joining wooden furniture together with thousands of strands of human hair, for example. Or placed the shoes of the disappeared inside cow bladders that are surgically stitched into square cubbies in the wall—looking like autopsies in a land where, often, anyone with any kind of money or power owns cattle, or is stealing cattle and pasture for cattle. One might be seeking an oil painting and find this yellow screen of a cow bladder instead, containing an unpleasant old shoe. “An insane gesture,” Salcedo says about her work, “…an absurd gesture. And it is a huge, huge, absurd waste of energy.”

*

Can you create silence?

*

One afternoon I was walking up the street in Apartadó with Enilda and two of her sisters. The sun was low and everything was wet and pleasant from rain that had cooled down the air; a gentle, soft light where the sun was usually harsh. We were in a good mood. We bumped into a pink-faced man with a red backpack who kissed the sisters’ cheeks and shook my hand. He said they looked great, and they said he looked great, too. “You’re skinny. Have you lost weight?” they asked. After we said goodbye, Enilda whispered, “That’s the man who killed my father.”

*

Salcedo was invited to an open museum in southern Bogotá where self-taught artists—many of whom were ex-combatants of the war—had exhibited paintings and sculptures. They put her on the spot for her opinions, and she told them their art was bad. She urged them to look outward to the world beyond Colombia for formal inspiration, to find more nuance. The artists were not happy. They had invited her to love their thing. They wanted monument, not anti-monument.

*

There can often be a lack of nuance in a certain kind of political art. What should be framed as a question is made perfectly legible and obvious, as an answer.

*

A few years ago, Enilda suffered a panic attack on a plane. She told her boss at the Norwegian Refugee Council she wanted to quit. “Not yet,” he said. He sent her on a mission to Central America, where she was shocked at the exodus of migrants to the United States—how those sent home from the border would turn around the very same day to head north again. She was different from them. She was tied to the land. “Arraigo” is the word in Spanish for this idea that a person is rooted to a place or a culture that it’s almost impossible to leave. When Enilda’s family’s land restitution claim gained traction in state institutions, she quit her job, moved home to Apartadó and started dedicating her life to making the land profitable.

*

Her father’s murder, Enilda says, is the reason they are all here. She is living forward in time and everything is possible if you move forward; she is not going to stay locked in some other life that could have been. Let’s be clear: the only way her father could have survived was to have joined the ones who killed him.

*

“If you don’t start, you don’t finish,” Neli says about their return to the family farm, Finca Surikí—rebuilding it from nothing, this place desecrated by paramilitaries who had turned it into a drug trafficking runway, as well as headquarters for controlling the local villagers and all exits north to the ocean.

*

At Finca Surikí, we are filming Enilda’s older sister Carmenza. The sky above her is as busy as an ocean. It swirls in a tide of thin, fast-moving clouds. “Mira la belleza,” she says, interrupting herself to look up, “look at the beauty.” Enilda shouts, “No!” Birds flood the sky. Enilda takes the camera off Carmenza, and points it at the brown bodies migrating south from the Caribbea for winter—spread out in asymmetrical patterns, not exactly hurried to go in one direction or another, just circulating above the farm.

*

Before their rifles were melted for art, guerrillas used them to intimidate and sexually assault women. Salcedo collaborated with these women—not specifically survivors of the guerrilla violence, but of violence from a variety of armed groups—to make “Fragmentos.” She put the steel slabs before them, and asked them to pound them with hammers to create the textures. At first, Salcedo said, they were tentative, but once they got into the rhythm of their work they let loose. Their names are on the gallery sign as collaborators: Nancy Medina, Gladys Ruiz, Nelcy Ramos, Ahíde Prada, Jennifer Prada, Aurora Moreno, Nidia Cortés, Marisol Betancourt, Mayra Hernández, Estevana Roa, Ana Murcia, Sirley Domicó, Felicitas Valderrama, Fulvia Chungana, Blanca Muñoz, Nancy Gómez, Ángela Escobar.

*

You could call the gray slabs “tiles,” but that sounds overly domestic. They fit together squarely. Their ridges can be sharp. Here’s a floodplain. Here’s a basin. Each is a map of Colombia. Each, placed in Bogotá, is of a world that most Bogotanos don’t know anything about. They experienced the war on TV. They saw refugees on street corners or asking for money in the aisle of a bus. The slabs are colder here than they would be in el Chocó or Urabá or el Cauca—“hot regions” in terms of their climate, but also for having experienced the worst violence during the war. One might go barefoot there. Would the slabs cut our feet? Do they have to be jagged enough so we can feel them through our city shoes with their thick soles of rubber and leather?

*

Steel is harsh material for a grave. People would prefer granite or cement or limestone. There is no human figure visible in the installation. You have to stand here in the silence and imagine the humans. You have to walk across it as a human and kneel to touch it—and maybe there will be another human nearby trying to sort it out, but hopefully not. It’s better to be alone in a gallery. Especially this one—just you and the security guard.

*

What do you feel through your feet? You feel the full weight of your body. If you stand too long in an art gallery, your feet hurt as much as your eyes. You feel rooted through your feet. You feel you are on the surface of the earth and that you are an animal upon it. Here you are on a surface created from violence, this artificial layer that was pounded by women and designed by a woman. Go back out into the city. You are walking across a land of gunmetal.