Truth is not a matter of exposure which destroys the secret, but a revelation that does justice to it.  ___  Walter Benjamin - The Origin of German Tragic Drama

 There are secrets that are kept from the public and then there are "public secrets" - secrets that the public chooses to keep safe from itself, like the troubling "don't ask, don't tell." The trick to the public secret is in knowing what not to know. This is the most powerful form of social knowledge. Such shared secrets sustain social and political institutions. The injustices of the war on drugs, the criminal justice system, and the Prison Industrial Complex are "public secrets". When faced with massive social problems such as racism, poverty, addiction, and abuse, it is easy to slip into denial. This is the ideological work that the prison does. It allows us to avoid the ethical by relying on the juridical.

Public Secrets provides an interactive interface to an audio archive of hundreds of statements made by current and former female prisoners, which reveal the many secret injustices perpetrated by the state against its most vulnerable citizens. Visitors navigate a multi-vocal narrative that links individual testimony, public evidence and social theory, in order to challenge the assumption that imprisonment provides a solution to social problems.

For these women our conversations are acts of ethical and political testimony - testimony that challenges the underlying principles of distributive justice and the dehumanizing mechanisms of the prison system. They are quite literally historians and theorists who speak out in an effort of collective resistance. I collaborate with them first as a witness and then as a "context provider".  ___  Sharon Daniel

http://vectors.usc.edu/projects/index.php?project=57

Blood Sugar operates as a companion piece to author Sharon Daniel and designer Erik Loyer's earlier, Webby award-winning Vectors project Public Secrets. Like their earlier work, which featured the voices of women in the California State Prison system, the primary content of Blood Sugar is a voice archive compiled from painstakingly recorded interviews with participants in an HIV prevention and needle exchange program in Oakland, CA. These are voices seldom heard from the "other" side of this country's mendaciously named "war on drugs."

In this work I have been more of an immigrant than an artist or ethnographer — crossing over from the objective to the subjective, from expertise or authority to unauthorized alien. As an academic I was once reluctant to include my own story in my work. But my position is not neutral; in theory or in practice, that would be an impossible place. So I have crossed over into what theorists such as Jane Gallop and Michael Taussig call “the anecdotal,” where theorizing and storytelling, together, constitute an intervention and a refusal to accept reality as it is.  ___  Sharon Daniel

http://vectorsjournal.org/issues/6/bloodsugar/

For the installation for Undoing Time Sharon Daniel is taking products produced in prison factories and inscribing them with quotes from interviews in which incarcerated men and women describe their encounters with the criminal justice system and discuss what it means to "do time" in California’s state prisons.

Like Betsy Ross*, I sew American flags ... but I do my work for 55 cents an hour on an assembly line inside one of the largest women's prisons in the world. I was sentenced to prison for 15 years - after being convicted of selling $20 worth of heroin to an undercover cop. I sew flags to buy toiletries and food. From the time I was a little girl, I was taught to put my hand over my heart when pledging allegiance to the flag. I emphatically believed in the values of independence, freedom and equality te flag represents. But as time went on and I grew older, I learned that these values do not apply equally to all Americans. As a black girl, I attended segregated schools without enough resources to provide a quality education. As an adult I struggled continuously with drug addiction, but there were no resources available for me to get help. Instead, I was sent to prison...  ___  Beverly Henry

We are all victims, we are all offenders...

This interdisciplinary, international arts research collaboration explores the use of new media technologies and documentary strategies to document and actively participate in the practice of restorative justice in an effort to test the potential for activist art practice to have a direct role in changing social conditions.

Crime is a social phenomenon -- conflicts, estrangements, violations, at once, create distance and proximity. In the aftermath two subjects emerge - there is a victim, there is an offender, and there is the space in between.  ___  Sharon Daniel