In her works Minimal Secret and Translation Lessons, Voluspa Jarpa asks whether the artistic use of archival material has an effect on history. Both works are the result of Jarpa’s yearslong engagement with declassified CIA files from Operation Condor in Chile between 1948 and 1994. Under this codename, the secret services of six Latin American countries worked together with the United States—with the goal of pursuing and killing leftwing and dissident forces throughout the world. The files were declassified in 2009 in the context of the UNESCO program “Memory of the World.” The CIA material is largely unreadable due to the massive amount of redaction. Jarpa’s work presents the archive itself as an artwork—and grapples with gaps, illegibility, and the unstable borders between fact and diction. In the video, Jarpa attempts to learn English on the basis of the CIA documents. The hopelessness of this endeavor rapidly becomes clear, however, for despite the feat of learning the hegemonic language, the documents remain unreadable. “Making conflicts invisible is an element of political violence. It supports historical amnesia and creates gaps in memories and archives” as Liliana Gómez writes. (S/K)