Silent Key / Deleted Entities 1925 -1996

Cindy Bernard, Deleted Entities 1925 – 1996, 115 parts (from the series Silent Key), Installation view, Boston Center for the Arts, 2009

Deleted Entities 1925 – 1996 consists of scans of QSL cards from hams operating in political entities that no longer exist such as the USSR, Nazi Germany, Korea and China during Japanese occupation, Japan and Germany during American occupation and Colonial Africa. When sorted by continent and date, the result is a spatial and durational mapping consisting of 115 pieces in an array 6 feet high by 55 feet long. The archive is inevitably incomplete – there isn’t necessarily a card for every continent from every year – these gaps cause the grid to resemble a musical score or perhaps even the rhythm of morse code.

The series Silent Key charts the geopolitical map of the 20th Century as represented through QSL cards – printed traces of individual contacts which track a convoluted global narrative. “Silent Key” is ham lingo for a radio operator who has died. Other parts of the series: Antennas, Portraits and Stations and July 15, 2010, 1pm.

To see all 115 cards, check my instagram feed. I’m posting one card a day starting January 6, 2016.