Labour as aesthetic strategy is an attempt to experience the suffering of others, to demonstrate the impossibility of remaining outside what one critiques, and yet, at the same time, when deploying it in something so 'useless' as this empty artwork, attempting to defeat capitalism.

Mieke Bal, 'Earth Aches: the Aesthetics of the Cut' in Doris Salcedo, Shibboleth (Tate Publishing, 2007) p. 60