In conjunction with the peace agreement between the Colombian government and the FARC guerrillas, it was agreed on to construct three monuments with the weapons and supplies of the war, one in the United Nations, another in Havana and one in Bogotá. The artist Doris Salcedo, who was commissioned for the work in Bogota, decided that a counter-monument, rather than a monument, should be built with the 37 tons of weapons deposed by the more than 13,000 ex-combatants. The sculptural work in question opposed the idea of glorifying violence and monumentalizing weapons and chose to create a floor that today functions as the physical and conceptual basis of this unbiased place that reverses the power relation created by the rifles.
This space of art and memory initially presented as an empty space, is, in turn, a space for the production and exhibition of other artistic works, in a program of annual convocations with a duration that will be equivalent to that of the conflict between the parties. Among the possible locations of the project was an old house of colonial typology, abandoned and in ruins. The building dates back to the seventeenth century and is located on the main north-south axis of the city, two blocks south of the Palace of Nariño, home of the presidents of Colombia and two blocks north of the now marginal neighborhood Las Cruces in the center of Bogotá, in the middle of an invisible border between the center of power and the people.
The artistic project manifests the need to create an architecture that at the same time is invisible, horizontal and without hierarchy. The existing remains of what once were the domestic volumes of a house, open and unfinished with courtyards and rooms, articulate an architectural dialogue between the place of memory, that is the ground from which the Colombian people begin to look towards the future, and the ruin that reminds us of the emptiness and absence left by war. The shape of the floor and the space was a result of occupying the negative space of what was formerly the house, inverting the inside and the outside, encapsulating the ruins as if they were relics.
In respectful resonance with the artwork, the facades were designed with the local maximum glass format and a single slender metal structure that supports the windows and the ceiling. The floor is composed of 1296 tablets of 60cm x 60cm, made with the molten metal of the weapons, folded at the edges, creating a monolithic surface with a height of 16 cm. The skin of the space, modulated at a distance of 2.40 m, broaden inwards to show the robustness of the sculpture and to disappear in front of the ruin. On the outside, the structure lays on a concrete slab levelled with the gravel courtyards.
