Missing Persons, authentic signatures of fake persons.

Missing Persons

Missing Persons is an installation by Trevor Paglen. Artist and writer, Paglen bases his works on the fine line separating the social sciences and contemporary art using unusual research methods which are useful to uncover the hidden sides of our world. Like in Missing Person. Since the Nineties, the CIA has enacted a secret program to kidnap suspected terrorists anywhere in the world. Captured persons are then locked away in a network of secret prisons managed by the CIA itself, called “black sites”, where they are routinely tortured. The CIA has called it “extraordinary rendition program”. Persons locked into these prisons “disappear” for all intents and purposes: there are no written documents attesting their detention, their identities are kept secret and the prisoners cannot communicate with the outside world. Confined in such absolute isolation that the prisons operators call them “ghost detainees”. The whereabouts of these black sites, called with code names like “Salt Pit”, are one of the biggest secrets of the CIA. The secret covers also the procedures to put this project into action. In fact, to capture and transport these ghost detainees, the CIA uses planes that cannot be connected to it in any way. These planes belong to a complicated network of puppet companies the directors of which are non-existent persons. Missing Persons is a list of signatures taken from company registers, airlines registers and company files that frames the absurdity of these fake identities shaped by military institutions. A familiar representation of non-persons, completely plausible for extremely sensitive legal purposes.

Francesca Tomassini