Terminally Ill Documents: The Lasting Impact of Ephemera

Murals and portraits of cultural icons such as George Floyd and Ahed Tamimi are more than aesthetically engaging objects. They can inspire viewers to act, attend protests, and share their own feelings on an issue, whether that be in the form of more street art or something as simple as a social media post. This is often how social and political movements are made. Street art poses a unique challenge to information professionals since the documents that are created with the intention or expectation of disappearance. They are documents suffering from terminal illness. Their ephemerality is their disease. Per the Document Academy, a document contains the following aspects: indexicality, plurality, fixity, documentality, and productivity – difficult constructs in the face of disappearance.