This morning, the Palacio de Cristal, located on a lake in Buen Retiro Park in Madrid, Spain, filled with muted light. The forecast called for rain in the city. Maybe this kept visitors away: a few have written reviews urging others to go only when it’s sunny. But Stella, an exuberant traveler from England, wrote just a few days ago on Trip Advisor: I visited this glass palace in torrential rain, so the sound on the glass roof and the creaking structure gave a whole new meaning to thunderstorms.
Erected in glass and metal in 1887, the original purpose of the grand structure was to house and showcase colonial power: plants and flowers taken from the Philippines flourished there. Today, the cross-shaped building functions as an exhibition space maintained by the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía.
A work by a Colombian artist named Doris Salcedo occupies the hall right now. Salcedo has given herself to making art that creates “grieving actions” for victims of violence around the world. She works within museums to crack museums (sometimes literally), asking visitors to reckon with the systemic divide between themselves and those who have been murdered, disappeared, or — in the case of the current exhibition in the Palacio de Cristal — drowned at sea.
Inside the Palacio, Salcedo and her collaborators have constructed stone slabs. Visitors, walking on the slabs, watch as water suddenly beads up. Letters form. Words: these are names. It’s as if an invisible historian below the ground is telegraphing: on the surface of the stone, the names appear and then erase.
These are names of immigrants who dared to cross the Mediterranean and didn’t make it. They left homes they knew to escape war, oppression, conditions antithetical to life. Salcedo has created a disappearing manifest inside the glass palace. The artist, intervening between the dead and the living, addresses the living, asking us to see. Who has been silenced? Who is being silenced, now? In our own lives, how do we connect to the pain of others without shutting down, turning away as they attempt to articulate moments of fear and powerlessness? It is a discipline.
The rain is falling outside the Palacio de Cristal. Someone is standing inside, reading a name. It is not just a name.
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Related post: “Moments of Silence.”
Photograph of Palacio de Cristal by Håkan Svensson (CC by 2.5)