This proposal critiques the Mormon church’s control over epistemological authority by using a moment of damage that occurred in the Mormon church’s archives, existing as one of the most secure vaults in the world located in Salt Lake City Utah. In 1960 a man named Mark Hoffman forged a series of “historical” documents that challenged the church’s historical founding. Upon discovery of the forgery, the church faced a public relations and credibility crisis. The archive becomes open to the public, becoming a space of pageant in which the church’s damage control becomes performed on the face of the existing archive. Positioned as a redesign of the church’s archives to address this insecurity, this critique is posited using the logic, technologies, and architectural forms of detection, forgery, and ecclesiastic structures surrounding the archival and historical document practices of sacrosanct epistemology.
