Transformative aesthetics after war: Grief, repair, and feminist resistance to political violence in the works of Lucila Quieto and Doris Salcedo

Abstract Art can transform narratives of trauma by centring the experiences of victims and survivors in public consciousness. It is with this reparative potential that art serves as a source of resistance in women’s lives during and after war. This article examines the work of two Latin American artists, Lucila Quieto of Argentina and Doris Salcedo of Colombia, in order to develop a theory of transformative aesthetics that identifies how creative expression can become an ideological source and material practice for feminist mobilization during periods of political violence. Considering Quieto’s Filiación (2013) and Salcedo’s untitled social sculpture (1992), we analyze how their artistic practices corrupt the intimate material of domestic life to display the fragments and traces left after enforced disappearance. Through these efforts, these artists confront the stigma against public demonstrations of private grief that silenced many survivors (particularly women) in both societies and also position memory as a constructive act that produces new political imaginaries. We argue that, in their artistic expression, Quieto and Salcedo produce materialities of dissent that center intimate domestic items as objects of political critique. By analyzing cultural production we place this work in dialogue with other scholarship that employs aesthetic approaches in security studies to recognize cultural spaces as sites of both domination and resistance. Our desired contribution is to conceptualize artistic production and its associated material intimate practice in domestic spaces as crucial sites of social and political meaning, which contribute to how women mobilize for justice and repair in (post-)conflict settings.