Part of the series Protocolos del silencio [Protocols of silence], this archive brings together records accumulated since 2003 through clinical practice, volunteer work, and field observation. The original drawings documented in these records were discarded or erased. Each entry displays a black rectangle accompanied by a description written in technical and bureaucratic language, so that the loss itself is inscribed within the same administrative logic that produced it.

The black rectangle occupies the place of an accomplished disappearance, functioning simultaneously as a redaction and as the trace of an institutional act. Drawing on Hal Foster’s analysis in An Archival Impulse (October 110, 2004) of the transformation of the archive into an artistic practice, Cárdenas takes this premise to its extreme by archiving only the procedure of elimination.

The work preserves the mark of suppression to reveal that, beneath censorship and the apparent neutrality of the form, an indelible trace of what has been erased remains.