This collaborative site-specific work uses cropped images from the Hoover Institute’s Radio Free Europe archives as the background for five panels, digitally printed on semi-transparent textiles. Overlaid on this imagery are excerpts from a recently declassified document detailing a 1951 meeting with George Kennan. A leading American diplomat and proponent of America’s Containment Strategy during the Cold War, Kennan saw Radio Liberty as one means to limit Communist expansion with transmissions that were a combination of anti-communist propaganda and news updates. As our way of processing news and messaging shifts to digital platforms, radio’s role in disseminating specific narratives has been eclipsed by newer technologies. Still, many of the underlying issues with state-run media remain.

 

Over the course of the three days at the now-abandoned Radio Liberty facility in Platja de Pals, Spain, these pieces fluttered in front of a decade’s worth of graffiti messaging.  Now they’re frozen in a photograph, already part of the remembered past.