I addressed Doris Salcedo’s untitled chairs (2004-05) in the context of their surrounding legal framework. I found it generative to turn the conversation towards an examination of the international human rights law that governs the sorts of brutalities that Salcedo’s work engages. Specifically, I focused on the compensation that the Inter-American Court of Human Rights grants the victims of disappearances, torture, and other such violations. Under the governing convention, the Court can order a state to grant either monetary or nonmonetary compensation to a victim or that victim’s next-of-kin. Critically, however, the Court almost never requires a state to take nonmonetary action. There are exceptions, of course; there are rare cases when the Court will order a state to admit its guilt, to issue an apology, to build a school or a park as a public admission of its wrongdoing. Such exceptions, however, are exceedingly few and far between. Generally, the Court simply orders the state to pay. Specifically, the Court requires the state to compensate the victim or the victim’s family according to an extremely detailed breakdown that includes pain and suffering, loss of labor, and loss of consortium or companionship. In other words, the Court ultimately casts the victim’s suffering as a dollar amount. Moreover, it does so pursuant to an exquisitely minute mapping of the victim’s bodily and emotional functions and a translation of these functions into the realm of capital.

I argued that it is here that the Inter-American prosecution of human rights breaks down in a way that opens onto Salcedo’s chairs. Because by translating human suffering strictly into the realm of the exchangeable, into a sort of body=capital calculus, the Inter-American system effectively attributes an ahistorical, immaterial fungibility to human rights offenses. Not only does the Court essentially impose a cost of doing business when that business includes atrocity, but by trucking in the realm of capital rather than memorial, the Court effectively erases the specific material body of the victim and the impact of his or her violation on the larger public. In this way, the Court’s cash awards effectively erase the formation of public and private memory. In the Inter-American system, the site of the victim’s suffering – the body – is dissolved into cash, the ultimate sign of generality, circulation, and, most importantly, a sign that can never be read backwards to reveal anything about a past occurrence.

Working off of these observations, the discussion focused on the way in which Salcedo’s chairs – both in their intense materiality and their false indexicality, their failure to really reconjure the body – disrupt precisely the sort of dissolution of memory that occurs when the tortured or disappeared human body is liquidated into signs.