Doris Salcedo Documentary

In February 2015, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago opened the first retrospective of renowned sculptor Doris Salcedo’s work. I managed the production of a video documentary to be installed in the exhibition that chronicles Salcedo’s site-specific and large-scale public projects, which have been a significant part of her artistic production over the past 15 years.

I was the producer for this project and worked on it in-house as the Digital Media Director for a year, and then as an independent contractor for the final year and and half.

I wrote the script, hired all the production crews and the post-production staff, managed all the video shoots, and conducted interviews with Doris Salcedo; her studio partners Carlos Granada, Roberto Uribe, Ingrid Raymond, and Sergio Clavijo; curator Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev; gallerists Tim Marlow and Carolyn Alexander; and Tate Director Sir Nicholas Serota. I traveled to Montreal, New York, London, and Bogotá, Colombia, to conduct the interviews and manage the film crews there. I also managed post-production in Chicago and Brooklyn.

View the final production here.

The research and pre-production phase began almost three years prior when I was on staff at the MCA Chicago, leading digital media initiatives. During this time, we had early discussions with the curators and Doris about the film we wanted to produce. As Doris’s site-specific installations are ephemeral, it was a priority for all to chronicle those works and present the video in a gallery within the exhibition to represent this important body of work in the show. With this focus in mind, we began by interviewing curators and studio partners on the various projects.

In the final year of production we interviewed Doris in her studio in Bogotá. While there, we also filmed work being produced in her studio. By the end of filming, we had accumulated dozens of hours of footage about Doris’s site-specific works, including the conceptual foundations for these works and incredible insights in to Doris’s process.