Christopher Gregory-Rivera: EL GOBIERNO TE ODIA (The Government Hates You)

From the 1940’s until 1987 the Puerto Rican Police- in collaboration with the FBI and CIA- watched, intimidated, and in some cases murdered political activists in the Caribbean U.S. Territory. The program remains one of the longest continuous surveillance programs by the US government on its own citizens. Aimed mostly at people advocating for independence from the United States, the operation, led by a secret police division, tracked over 150,000 people and compiled extensive dossiers on over 15,000.

The program was uncovered in 1987 after a decade-long investigation into the brutal execution of two university students by the Puerto Rico Police Intelligence Division in 1978. When the unit was dismantled, the original surveillance files were returned directly to the victims, whole and unredacted. This is the only such declassification in the world, and a rare view into the inner workings of how states use surveillance for ideological persecution. The files reveal that neighbors, close friends, and even in some cases family members served as informants in exchange for money or under coercion. To this day, those who watched and were watched live side by side in a society with deep wounds but no collective memory of what happened. 

For the last decade Christopher Gregory-Rivera has become a guerrilla archivist, finding these files and rescuing the archive through still life photography, digitization and research. The resulting reconstructed “archive” repairs the web of time where it was broken, affording a window into forbidden political history and a chance at a national truth and reconciliation process at a time when the colonial relationship with the US is more fraught than ever. 

The body of work appropriates material from the photographic archive of the secret police in the National Archives of Puerto Rico which contains over 40,000 images. A part of those images were digitized by the artists and submitted digitally back to the archive in an effort to protect the vulnerable archive against the entropy of the tropics and increasingly aggressive budget restrictions at the archive. The work also draws from the hundreds of victims that still have files in their possession as well as all of the surveillance files unable to be returned and administrative documents of the police. 

The appropriated images are enigmatic. Some images were taken hidden but most were confrontational, obvious; the panopticon materialized in daily life. In the images there are moments where somebody looks directly back at the camera: an interaction, a collaboration or rejection. The stares are glimpses into the perception, attitude and awareness of this opaque, secret, illegal practice by its own subjects and sometimes the perpetrators. If the images the police took of themselves were meant to be secret, staring into the camera is its acknowledgement. If the images the secret police took of subjects are violent, the counter gaze is its resistance. 

The Intelligence Division created an archive that was intended as a weapon against those who governments see as a threat to their political project. The images are largely devoid of captions and present more questions than they answer. They are heartbreakingly ambiguous given that they are one of the only documents of this largely forbidden and forgotten political history.

The original photographs by the artist examine the physical objects and bureaucratic detritus of the massive secret surveillance program. Each file was painstakingly assembled and carbon copied by hand. The vicious and absurd scale with which information was collected leads us to believe that it was the practice of watching itself that was more important that the information collected, especially since it was collected illegally and not admissible in court. The evidenciary nature of the still lives reinforces that it is the volume, scale and craft of the file that is important, not what it contains. Not dissimilar to how police photographers surveilled visually; the artist surveils the objects back inviting viewers to make up their own narratives about the content.

Although the secret police has been disbanded this practice has not ended. The most recent component of the work are stills from a leaked police video documenting protests in 2017 against the imposition of a Federal Fiscal Control Board. In subsequent investigations into the wrongful arrests of protestors, it came to light that not only were there troves of footage but also a huge cache of personal data and private conversations requested from Facebook of over 500 individuals who interacted with protest videos. Although deeply rooted in the history of Puerto Rico, the project’s goal is to offer a glimpse into the tactics that threaten true and free civil discourse to this day around the globe.

Gregory-Rivera’s images ask: by understanding the state’s gaze can we come to understand the current civil society it built? If so, does that allow us to dismantle its control over us now?

Participant

Christopher Gregory-Rivera