Drawing on 22 sets of declassified documents from 1941 to 1993 from the archives of the CIA, the U.S. State Department, the intelligence services of Italy, Germany, France, and Belgium, as well as leaked NATO documents, this piece addresses the surveillance of French intellectuals during the 1980s, juxtaposing the printed documents with the words of Michel Foucault on secrecy, a central concept in Jarpa’s work.

While Foucault was teaching his class in Security, Territory and Population at the Collège de France, the international secret services were devising strategies to influence his thinking and that of his fellow citizens, strategies that ranged from the manipulation of public opinion to the sowing of terrorist attacks to stop the advance of the left in Europe at all costs. This piece inaugurates the exhibition Waking State, the first in which the artist tackles head-on the secret operations of U.S. agencies in Europe, closing with it a cycle of work in which she sought to understand the way in which foreign agencies and governments have operated outside the law, time and again, in Latin America and Europe.