Artist melts guns to tiles for monument

The weapons once used by Colombian rebels to wage war have been turned into a monument in the country’s capital, as the country grapples with its bloody past.

That deal with the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (or Farc) formally ended 52 years of civil war that left 260,000 dead and over 7mn displaced. Other leftist rebel groups and state-aligned paramilitaries contributed to the bloodshed.

Last year, the Farc turned in 37 tonnes of rifles, pistols and grenade launchers which the artist Doris Salcedo has had melted down and recast as tiles that line the floor of a new gallery space just a block from the presidential palace in Bogota. The work, called Fragments was inaugurated on Monday.

“The idea was to take the weapons which have caused so much pain and turn them into something useful,” said Salcedo, who is best known for her 2007 work Shibboleth which was composed of a long crack across the floor of the turbine hall at the Tate Modern.

The Bogota-based artist said she was reluctant to make a traditional monument, referring to her project as an “antimonument”. “A monument is a way of forgetting something, of making it invisible,” she said. “Weapons and war are not something that should be celebrated.”

The space was built with the help of victims of the conflict, who pounded the steel into the ruptured shape of the tiles. It will host two guest exhibitions every year related to the conflict.

“It was like a catharsis, smashing the hammer into the metal,” Angela Maria Escobar, who was gang-raped by paramilitaries in 2000, said. “The sound was almost deafening.”

Colombia’s president, Ivan Duque, snubbed the inauguration, having declined Salcedo’s invitation. He took office in August this year, having opposed the peace deal on the campaign trail.