“Noviembre 6 y 7”: Bogota's Memory Etched in Absence

In 2002, Colombian artist Doris Salcedo transformed the façade of Bogotá’s Palace of Justice into a haunting site of remembrance. Her public art installation, titled “Noviembre 6 y 7, 2002,” commemorated the 1985 Palace of Justice siege, a national tragedy that left deep scars on Colombia’s collective memory.

The original event took place on November 6 and 7, 1985, when guerrilla fighters from the M-19 movement stormed the Palace of Justice, taking hundreds hostage, including Supreme Court justices. The army’s violent counterattack ended in flames — the building burned, and over 100 people were killed or disappeared, many of their bodies never identified. For years, silence and political tension shrouded the incident.

Seventeen years later, Salcedo chose not to represent the violence directly but to let absence speak. On the exact anniversary, over the course of 53 hours, she lowered 280 empty wooden chairs down the façade of the rebuilt Palace of Justice — one for each victim of the siege. Slowly, methodically, the chairs descended from the roof, suspended by invisible wires, as if falling from the weight of memory itself. Each of the 280 chairs used in the installation was borrowed from homes across Bogotá — linking private domestic spaces to a collective act of national mourning.

The installation was both intimate and monumental. It avoided spectacle, instead embodying collective mourning through quiet repetition and time. Viewers stood in silence as the chairs descended one by one, evoking the fragility of human life and the persistence of grief. The piece unfolded in real time, echoing the duration of the original siege, transforming the building into both a memorial and a witness.

Today, “Noviembre 6 y 7” remains one of the most powerful examples of contemporary public art, showing how silence, repetition, and ritual can speak more eloquently than any monument of stone or bronze.