The artist, famed in the UK for her extraordinary fissure in the turbine hall, has turned her focus to the climate catastrophe and the plight of migrants, but old concerns about her country remain

As the world turns toward another fractured year, Doris Salcedo, the Colombian artist, is at work trying to fathom how to create a house out of human hair. Salcedo, 65, has long made herself a channel of collective trauma, her art expressing profound anger at political crimes and atrocities at home and abroad – as well as creating imaginative spaces for mourning. Her hair project, she says, comes in response to what she has come to think of as “domicide”: the calculated bombing and destruction of places that people call home.

“Most of my work is a response of some kind to war,” she says. “And we have all witnessed – of course for decades in Colombia, but also now in Ukraine and Syria and Sudan and in Gaza – this destruction of houses for the sole purpose of escalating human suffering. In Gaza some people have rebuilt their houses several times and seen them destroyed again. So I was thinking, how does it feel to be somewhere where there are no bricks, no concrete, no wood, absolutely nothing you can build with? And I thought: OK, it’s like a spider, wanting to construct something from inside. So I’m trying to make a gigantic spider web house out of human hair. And on top of being made out of human hair, it’s being ripped apart.”