“R — — — R — — — — : Historian, Curator, Sexual Predator” Has Been Redacted

The story that this post replaced has been returned to its original link as of May 10, 2021. You can read it here.

NOTE: The post, from April 16, 2019, is replicated below in full, as a matter of public record. It was posted as a replacement for my original #MeToo post, following baseless legal harassment.

What could this image possibly have to do with the post that led you to this link? Read on for one of many answers.

Lest future historians wonder what happened to this link:

Version 1 of this post, published on April 3, 2019, was removed from this link on April 16, 2019.

The primary source on which that post was based was a 69-tweet thread by @intersectionist on March 30, 2019, 8:33am–10:39am, during the National Council on Public History’s Annual Meeting, using the conference hashtag #NCPH2019.

It would appear that several thousand people saw them before they were removed.

#CantStopTheSignal

Redaction is an interesting tactic.

Chilean artist Voluspa Jarpa has done some cool things with turning archival materials effectively made useless by censorship into powerful visual installations.

Like this piece “Secret Memorialis,” which includes heavily redacted documents from both the CIA and the Mexican Dirección Federal de Seguridad, surrounding the October 2, 1968 massacre and repression of hundreds of student protesters, in advance of the Mexico City Olympic Games that we Norteamericanos remember only for the triumphant Black Power salute.

Installation view of “Secrets Memorabilis,” in “M68: memorial 1968/movimientos sociales,” Centro Cultural Universitario Tlatelolco, Mexico City

The exhibition the piece is in is effectively all about the struggle over memory, documentation, and truth between those with power and those who resisted, over the course of 50 years.

Turns out it’s hard to redact the truths inscribed in bodies — both present and absent.

That’s all I’ll say about that.

But here’s a bit more about the artist, from her gallery:

Voluspa Jarpa’s work is rooted on the meticulous analysis of declassified archives and leaked documents of foreign interventions happening mainly in Chile and other Latin American countries (but also in Europe) during the Cold War. By working with the materiality of the defaced archives, Jarpa unearths painful truths about these often brutal interventions, reflecting simultaneously on the nature of the archive, on memory and the cultural notion of trauma.