Archive of the disappeared, the disappearing

Joanne Hayhurst, Archivist. Litchfield County, CT

Click here to page through the book

Archive of the disappeared, the disappearing is a multi-page accordion book. Each page is an open black envelope corresponding to each month of the first year of the current Trump administration, Jan. 2025-Dec. 2025.  Into each envelope I have saved documents: individual news articles of organizations, photos of people, and specific words from governmental websites, all purged from our common American history.

When the administration moved so rapidly to eliminate so much so quickly, I personally needed to slow the losses down, creating a record for myself to absorb what was happening, month by month.

I was inspired by George Orwell’s 1984, in which the protagonist, Winston Smith, has the official duty of depositing into the “memory hole” all historic information that doesn’t “align with the intent of the current administration.” All physical evidence of that past is sucked into a chute leading to an incinerator and destroyed.  The 1984 government depicted is ruled by a maxim:

“Who controls the past controls the future; who controls the present controls the past. “  

This archive is my personal effort to keep in the present who and what the Trump administration is disappearing: people, organizations and words, as it  attempts to construct a past devoid of their existence.