It was not created to surprise, titillate, or inform, but to better serve the police's constant need for surveillance and punishment.

And it would indeed be foolish, stubborn, maybe even pridefully obsessive … if this exact recopying of words did not feel somehow necessary, an exclusive and privileged way of entering into the world of the document, as both accomplice and outsider.

Words are windows; they will let you catch a glimpse of one or several contexts. But words can also be tangled and contradictory. They can articulate inconsistencies whose meaning is far from clear.

whose authors, constrained by the course of events, never intended to be authors.

significance if it fills a role that nothing else could.

Details of work situations provide the same type of narrative, giving us both information and that which enables us to access

their words reveal things that ordinarily went unspoken.

worse: the archive is like a forest without clearings, but by inhabiting it for a long time, your eyes become accustomed to the dark, and you can make out the outlines of the trees.

it would give them the opportunity to clean up and impose some order on public spaces.