Splintered Archives -- Versions and Versioning through Erasure Arts and Poetry

Abstract

A predominantly twenty-first-century, textual-visual practice in othering and versioning documents, erasure (arts and poetry) is the outcome of a variety of disruptive techniques such as black-out, white-out, or strike-through of segments of the "pre-text," text-that-is-already-there. Erasure thus bridges and separates the "original" (however we may define and understand the term) to and from the subsequent versions of the original that are erased out of it by the same or subsequent authors. A study of two single works of erasure by Niina Pollari and Jenny Holzer in order to showcase some of the ways creative works of erasure "version" documents and "splinter" archives, this essay examines erasure poetry and arts as a creative activist response to the documental crises of US empire in the present century.