Objects, as some scholars would state, are ‘evocative’ and to an extent have an agentic pull over human beings. ‘Things’ have a capacity to influence and shape the reality of around them and thus are significant elements in understanding experiences of mass human rights violations including experiences of violent death and disappearance. Thus, objects and things touched by or associated with the dead and the disappeared can be to have an agentic power, having research and methodological implications. These objects may include human remains as well as photographs and personal belongings, which often feature prominently in the imaginaries of those who continue to mourn or seek out those they have lost. For instance, the families of the disappeared in Sri Lanka use to significant effect pictures of their missing loved ones. In other instances, toys, clothes, watches and even eyeglasses dug up from suspected mass graves have a capacity to evoke a sense of uncanniness amongst the living. The power of these objects seems to lie in the way they continue to carry ‘traces’ of the disappeared and are part of the person who had carried them.
This panel, made up of presenters researching different geographical contexts, explores the power of objects associated with the dead and the disappeared, including the extent to which – and how – they make traces of a violent past visible and actively intervene in the present. Questions to be explored include:
• How do specific objects facilitate remembering the dead and disappeared?
• What meanings about the dead and missing do objects communicate or are constructed by those who interact with them?
• What roles do objects play in building and enabling communities of emotions and memory, and struggles for justice?
Kar-Yen Leong
National Chung Cheng University
"Objects of Pain: materiality, memory and torture in post Martial Law"
Filipino observers pointed to a democratic regression when voters chose President Rodrigo Duterte whose anti drugs policies caused the deaths of thousands of suspected drugs peddlers. This view was further entrenched, when the son of former dictator Ferdinand Marcos Senior, became president. For many critics the choice of Marcos Jr. was an affront given that his father had disappeared tens of thousands of dissidents and human rights activists.The former’s savvy social media campaigning succeeded in white washing the legacy of Marcos Sr.’s martial law period. This also raises questions on the possibility of the return of authoritarianism since most voters in the Philippines suffer from ‘collective amnesia’ in a highly social media saturated environment.
Therefore, this research investigates the possibility of places such as the Human Rights Victims Violations Memorial Commission (Memcom) in countering historical revisionism. It serves as both a museum and as well as an archive containing the files of 70,000 claimants demanding compensation for torture suffered at the hands of the state. My research asks how these files serve as a bulwark against forgetting. I will also look closely at exhibits within its museum which showcases the torture implements used on the victims. What effects do these files, and ‘objects of pain’ have on visitors? How do the stories of the claimants affect those who come visit or work on these files? I state that Memcom serves not only as a museum but that as a government archive it has authoritative power openly acknowledging the state’s bloody past. I posit that by using the Philippines as a case study this research contributes to a deeper understanding of memory studies and transitional justice.
Shari Eppel
Ukuthula Forensic Anthropology Team
"Exhuming memory in the death world of Matabeleland, Zimbabwe"
In Zimbabwe, massacres of Ndebele civilians took place in the 1980s. To date, there has been no apology and no reparation, with no change in government, with fear and silence continuing. Within families, silences may be total, with younger generations not knowing their parents were tortured or even murdered. Families ‘disappear’ these dead from spoken family memories, to avoid invoking fear and guilt. Frozen grief has left communities in a calamitous space, where misfortunes are blamed on failures to mourn the ancestors. The unhappy whisperings of these murdered souls the abaphansi bazondile – haunt schoolyards, pit latrines, caves and forests. These hauntings may become unbearable to the family idlozi – the medium through which the ancestors speak. Murdered ancestors appear in dreams, even appearing to generations born since the killings, who know nothing of them. Younger generations thus find themselves demanding the truth, when strange ancestors appear in dreams with requests needing explanation. The dead themselves force buried memories back into the family realm. As the dead demand to come home, exhumations have taken root to honour them. The dead are finally healed by reburying them in the right place, with the right rituals. This has entailed embracing ‘new traditions’: exhumation was not previously known, because taboos exist around handling the dead. The Ukuthula Forensic Anthropology Team plays an important, facilitatory role here. Each exhumation undercuts of the state’s repressive intent to keep knowledge repressed in fearful communities. Every unearthing of silenced bones acts in direct opposition to this. The dead are brought into the light: they are remembered, heard and reclaimed with honour. Memories and murmurings become empirical knowledge in the course of a careful, professional, exhumation and reburial.
Tam Ngo
The NIOD Institute
"Retouching the Dead: Presence, Absence and the Digital Afterlives of War Portraits in Vietnam"
Nearly half the 1.2 million Vietnamese fallen soldiers – recognized by the Vietnamese state as martyrs are missing in action. Many of them have never had a portrait made, while for many others, the only image they have faded with time. While the state, the army and DNA forensic scientists work tirelessly to recover their bodies and name. Since 2020, a growing society of graphic designers in Vietnam have applied their digital skills to restore the faded faces of the missing martyrs. Based on ethnographic fieldwork among several graphic designer groups and families of the missing in Vietnam, this paper analyses martyr portraits as agentive memorial objects central to the practice of remembrance and care. Their transformation, from hand painted spirit portraits once made from memory, or faded pictures but imbued with memory and emotion to high resolution digital images – reshapes both the aesthetic and affective presence of the dead. For young relatives, the retouched faces offer continuity and pride; for older mourners, they can feel estranging, even unsettling, as familiar faces are refashioned through the lens of modern beauty and technological precision. My argument is that these portraits speak of the dead not simply as visual representations but as intervening objects– they reanimate, transform, touch, and upset the fragile equilibrium of mourning. As they move between the intimate realm of family altar and the public spaces of social media, they generate new communities of memory and mourning. By tracing the circulation and observing the reception of these images, the paper reflects on how visual repair practices can serve as a methodology of things, revealing how objects sustain, modify and complicate the presence of the absent.
Nila Utami
University of British Columbia
"Beautiful Insurrections: Activations of Intergenerational Memories of the Disappeared in Indonesia"
Silence was an adopted strategy by many Indonesian families following the disappearance, detention and mass murder of their loved ones during the 1965 genocide, a powerful shield to protect the next generation from political reprisal and social isolation. In this context, how do memories of the disappeared activate a generation removed from, even previously unaware of, their existence? This question animated the 2025 knowledge exchange in Indonesia between an international collective of survivors, activists, artists, and scholars as part of the Transformative Memory International Network. During the knowledge exchange, we encountered the monumental efforts of the Indonesian state to impose a version of history that erases the memory of the disappeared publicly. Yet we also witnessed the efforts of the next generation to remember, launching what we call beautiful insurrections and allowing for a collective witnessing of life and memory of the present.
Memory and affection as resistance to forgetting and negligence on the part of victims of the radiation accident with cesium 137 in central Brazil.
Individual paperTrauma, Affect, and Emotion00:00 Midnight - 00:00 Midnight (America/Argentina/Buenos_Aires) 2026/07/29 03:00:00 UTC - 2026/07/29 03:00:00 UTC
The city of Goiânia, Goiás, located in central Brazil, suffered the country's largest radioactive accident in 1987, the largest in the world outside of a nuclear power plant. Two men found an abandoned radiotherapy device in a clinic. Believing the material to be of commercial value, they transported and opened it. It contained a capsule containing 19 grams of cesium-137. The opening of the capsule initiated a serious process of contamination of the soil, air, people, and their property. Initially, four fatalities were recorded: two men who opened the capsule, a woman who handed the capsule over to the health department, and a child who handled the radioactive element. The accident left the city of Goiânia and its residents in a state of uncertainty, mainly due to the lack of information about the contamination and its effects, which led to prejudice and isolation of the victims. The absence of memory policies regarding the incident, the lack of adequate clarification about the contamination process, and the trauma generated among city residents contributed to the victims' deliberate exclusion and penalization. This can be exemplified by the processes of social exclusion and the ineffectiveness of fulfilling the rights of those affected. This research seeks to understand how victims resist physical and psychological violence and state negligence, and how they seek, through relationships of support and affection, to rebuild their memories against oblivion and silencing? The accounts of those directly affected by the accident, displaced from their homes, and having their belongings taken away, seek to rebuild their lives using emotions and affection as a reference through support networks. It is the emotional memories of those who were victims of the accident that guide their resistance to oblivion and state negligence.
Presenters Keides Batista Vicente PROFESSOR RESEARCH , UNIVERSIDADE ESTADUAL DE GOIÁS, BRASIL
Keides Batista Vicente