Erasure of histories does not happen over night. Lindsay Mulcahy has been musing on erasure this summer and shared her thoughts on Places Journal.
“ Over the summer, I watched through my computer screen as bronze monuments to white supremacy and colonialism collided with pavement, and I stood in the streets witnessing the transformation of Los Angeles by graffiti, fire, and mass mobilizations.1 At the same time, across the field of historic preservation, undercurrents of dissent were gathering force. At the recent “#DismantlePreservationVirtual Unconference,” academics, practitioners, and activists gathered to confront the violence of historical erasure and capitalist accumulation that undergirds the field’s rigid enforcement of historicity as time-bound and subject to material integrity.2 But if there is much that deserves to be taken down, conference speakers also uplifted enduring legacies and current practices of resistance and restorative justice.3 As an aspiring practitioner in the discipline of heritage conservation, I have been sifting through yellowed ephemera in the archives and meandering down quiet streets in an attempt to cultivate my own contribution to this practice of “radical (re)imagination.” This is an essay about restoration; about uncovering layers of history and paint; about self-preservation and transformation through sisterhood and queer kinship.”