In February 2015 I saw Doris Salcedo’s Plegaria Muda, an installation at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. Each sculpture was composed of two tables inverted upon the other with a layer of earth in between where live grass was shooting out from the inverted table on top.

The artist said that her research into gang violence in Los Angeles showed that victims and perpetrators share socioeconomic circumstances that lead to conditions of increased violence. Viewed as lesser in the eyes of society, these lives matter only to those who grieve for them, as for the grieving mothers of those in mass graves in Colombia.