In this work, Soto-Román appropriates redacted political documents to proceed with even more erasures. For instance, the application of correction fluid by the author expands the redacted blackouts inserted by CIA before the release of the documents in 2000. While CIA’s blackouts considered some information to be sensitive, Soto-Román considered almost all information to be sensitive. And it is. Rather than a contradiction, we are invited to reflect on this as a radical expressive gesture. To quote the author: “Why must our documents be coherent / If it is precisely the order that we want to subvert?” In the work documented here, we find a practice of mimicking that does not intend to mimic. Soto-Román engages in an act of decomposing and rearticulating the documents, not for the same purpose, but working instead with the reverse goal in mind: to expose, to remember, to subvert. Content is no longer visible, but the act of erasure itself is. The blackouts and the white shapes silently outline the form of the absent information. Other techniques applied here—scratch (“raspadura”), smudge (“borrón”), and strikeout (“tachadura”)—still imply partial legibility. This means that the words are still present in their absence. Correction fluid, sandpaper brush, fingers, and all kinds of pens and markers are media used for obfuscation procedures. Even large strings of duct tape and a considerable amount of powder extracted from several pills are used to make invisible the words inscribed on the surface of the paper. Interestingly, the voice-over script used in the video was also subjected to all these different techniques of erasure. Looking at other common practices of oppression in dictatorships, including those adopted by Pinochet’s regime, we can argue that erasure somehow finds its counterpart in violent detention and forced disappearance. In fact, both are acts of erasure of the dissenters. Thus, presence is always a form of absence in the hands of dictatorial regimes. In a related way, the material practice of inscription in Soto-Román’s work is a radical gesture of des-inscription, or disappearance in itself. We can thus state that, in this case, to remediate is also to demediate.

Archives tell all kinds of truths, many of them terrible. In 1973, a faction of the Chilean army led by Pinochet overthrew and killed the democratically elected President Salvador Allende. This coup would not have been possible without the support of the CIA, collaborating with International Telephone & Telegraph. In 2000, the CIA documents about the coup were declassified. Carlos Soto-Román works with this archive of documents so as “to give silence the importance that it deserves.” Calmly and methodically, he interrogates and remediates them. At moments we see him performing his own erasures on pages that are often also full of the black squares of state redaction. At other moments, he is crossing words out, as if to redact their histories. At other moments, he is covering them up with white-out. In the middle of the video, there is a page with the word “Pinochet,” left legible. As Soto-Román whites out the words around it, words about time, worth, and human rights, he talks about this practice where he puts into “questions the documents that describe violence.” Then, once all the remaining words from the CIA document have been erased, apart from “Pinochet,” he grabs a ballpoint pen and crosses out this word, making it illegible. This is a video that wrestles with a terrible history.