Carlos Soto Román with Alexis Almeida, Daniel Beauregard, Daniel Borzutzky, Whitney DeVos, Patrick Greaney, and Thomas Rothe. RSVP here.

Carlos Soto Románe’s 11 evokes the “other” September 11th: Chile’s September 11, 1973, when Augusto Pinochet led a military coup to oust the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende and inaugurated a brutal 17-year dictatorship.

Assembled from found material such as declassified documents, testimonies, interviews, and media files, 11 takes the form of collage, erasure, and appropriation, the langue emerging from censorship and suffocation as experienced under military rule. Soto-Román’s work asks us to understand the past through what has been covered up, to reflect on the spoken and unspoken pieces that interact to create a collective memory.

This collaborative version into English, marking the 50th year since the coup and translated collectively by eight translators, attempts to answer that question and provide a means to reflect on the relationship between writing, trauma, and politics.