This article considers the work of Colombian artist Erika Diettes (b. 1978), specifically her projects Sudarios, Río Abajo and Relicarios, as a reflection on the possibilities and limitations of making artworks amidst conflict. Colombia’s internal armed conflict challenges any form of representation, being so complex and on such a scale that words often fall away. Diettes’ art concerns what remains after the monstrosity of violence, where we sigh in sorrow. It is not, however, the ambition of her artworks to repeat the stories she has heard from relatives and victims of violence, nor to attempt to ‘do justice’ to or for them. Rather, she seeks to use the force of art – a force that art inevitably holds and that artists must employ carefully – to insert something into the world that is attentive to those lives and experiences that may otherwise fade from our accounts, slip from our memories.