redacted,
repurposed,
rewrote
What does it mean to unwrite something?
To take words that have already done their damage—parasitic, clinging to the walls of cognition—and force them through another metamorphosis, like a cicada transform 蟬變, these texts undergo their own shedding: a moulting of meaning.
Transformation moves in both directions. Pseudo-intellectual self-help books—like Jordan Peterson’s 12 Rules for Life or Philip Zimbardo’s The Lucifer Effect—thrive on uncertainty, latching onto fear, offering rigid pseudo-doctrine where nuance is needed. They weaponise ideology, dressing reactionary thought that seep into moments of doubt, mutating thought into something rigid, vicious, evangelical. Their language is a virus that convinces its host it was always there, natural, inevitable.
Redacting is not a passive act. Each stroke of erasure requires reading, absorbing, wrestling with the words before they can be rewritten. The process demands confrontation—not only with the text itself but with the artist’s own guilt, the lingering imprint of once believing in these words. To debate with them is to argue with a former self, to retrace the pathways ideology carves into the psyche. Every redacted page is a reckoning. Every rewritten line an attempt to unmake and remake the self.
‘redacted, repurposed, rewrote’ is developed through research at Metal Peterborough.