Salting the Earth

Salar la tierra [Salting the Earth] is a series of shots of an empty field in front of a church, where a performance takes place. The performance, a woman walking from different points of the frame into this space, is suspended and repeated by a succession of shots, which creates a temporal and spatial displacement of the figure in the image. The site is El Salado, a small town in the interior of Bolivar province, Colombia. In 2000, this was the site of a massacre of nearly one hundred people by paramilitary groups; villagers were held in the church. El Salado was subsequently abandoned, with some townspeople slowly beginning to return a few years after the massacre.