GATT officials physically erased the ILO’s labor imagery when taking over its Geneva building.

Evidence

One of the first activities of the new occupants was to remove and cover over murals and tilework that had decorated the building in its previous function as the seat of the International ­Labour Organ­ization (ILO). Rolled up and stashed in a gardener’s cottage was a mural by Dean Cornwell; donated by the American Federation of ­Labor in 1956, the mural depicted female secretaries at walls of card cata­logues, brass bands, and elementary schoolteachers flanking a central image of a bare-­chested worker in an ironworker’s apron, broken shackles dangling from his wrists. — Quinn Slobodian, Globalists, 790

Categorization

• ADDENDUM: Directly supports the Grafting & Growth piece’s theme of material erasure of prior worldviews — though stronger as a follow-up: the GATT physically covered labor-centered world-order art when assuming the ILO’s seat. Could serve the Sacrifice piece too as an example of iconoclastic replacement of prior symbolic order.
• SEED: Angles for an essay on how institutions signal their ideology through buildings and iconography — the GATT literally papering over the ILO’s labor murals foreshadows that institution’s shift to price-signal economics.