6.1. Making Memory Matter: Activist Practices of Remembrance [ES/EN]

For over a decade, European media have been reporting on a rising death toll of European border policies set in place to curtail irregular migration. It is estimated that in 2024 alone, more than 3400 people died or went missing while trying to reach Europe and seek asylum in various countries in the European Union. Yet, those deaths remain largely invisibilized and normalised in public and political discourses, so are the posthumous fates of migrant bodies – structural violence behind border deaths goes hand in hand with the structural inaction that contributes towards their unfolding, and also with structural blindness to their material realities and outcomes. This presentation will address the processes behind the production of invisibilized death and its conditions of possibility. It will analyse how sophisticated technologies of surveillance and control, repressive state policies, and the properties of the highly policed borders partake in the production of impunity through the restriction of visibility, and through unequal access (among states, activists and migrants) to the available means of seeing and sensing. I will take a critical look on modes of bureaucratic and inherently partial materialization and visibilization of the dead through infrastructures of forensic sciences that transform them into variously collected, constructed and mediated data (visual, textual, digital, biomedical, etc) and the implications of those transformations and rematerializations of the dead. But I will also analyse several art and activist projects that seek to disrupt those dominant forms of (in)visibility and ask what forms of emergence of the dead they foster and facilitate and which they effectively prevent. The question about the regimes of visibility and emergence will be closely tied in the paper with the question of regimes of memory and subjectification through which the dead are constructed and undone, owned and dis-belonged, and racialised.

In Guatemala, acts of genocide were committed during the internal armed conflict (1960 1996) against several Maya Indigenous groups, including the Maya Ixil. Starvation was inflicted on the Ixil through scorched earth operations, involving massacres that entailed the destruction of crops and livestock, and the forced displacement of communities into the mountains, where hunger and disease were rampant. Additionally, the army established model villages in which displaced populations were confined under strict military control, with minimal access to adequate nutrition and healthcare. The long-term consequences remain visible today in the form of acute malnutrition and chronic food insecurity affecting Ixil communities. In this context, Ixil survivors have a long trajectory of mobilization for accountability, truth-telling, and reparations. Yet, little scholarly attention has been given to how survivors remember their lived experiences of conflict-related starvation, or how these memories shape present-day mobilization for redress. Drawing from qualitative research conducted between 2021 and 2025 in the Ixil region, as well as the author's participation in a collaborative project to create an Ixil Memory Museum, this paper examines how past and present hunger, malnutrition, and deprivation inform current memorialization initiatives. The findings show that survivors integrate narratives of hunger into ongoing local memory work in the following ways: 1) foregrounding testimonies of starvation; 2) advocating for food security and sovereignty through the preservation of native seeds, and 3) rescuing ancestral knowledge, such as traditional cooking practices. By analyzing how survivors mobilize starvation narratives and food security needs into memorialization strategies, the paper contributes to ongoing debates on survivor mobilization in genocide and memory studies. It highlights the centrality of food and subsistence in the struggles for justice and social repair, particularly in contexts marked by historical socioeconomic inequalities, revisionism, and the erosion of democratic spaces.

By focusing on the collective memory surrounding the Franciscan monk Ivan Franjo Jukić (1818–1857)—whose political activism sought to bring civil rights and social equality to the 'raya', the non-Muslim second-class subjects in 19th-century Ottoman Bosnia—in this paper I propose reading martyrdom-oriented memories through an activist lens as a subversive approach to shaping contextual theologies of tradition. After publishing the document "Wishes and Pleas of Christians in Bosnia to Sultan Abdülmecid" (1851), imperial authorities arrested and expelled Jukić from Bosnia, who died in exile a few years later. Despite his tragic fate, the friar has been widely remembered as a “predecessor of Bosnian modernity” whose revolutionary legacy encapsulates both sides of the memory-activism nexus. First, my presentation examines Jukić’s role as an exemplary 'memory activist' who founded schools, museums, and cultural organizations, and authored pioneering historical, ethnographic, and geographical accounts of Bosnia. Second, drawing on the broad cultural influence of this anti-imperial rebel—a proto-Yugoslav who advocated a transethnic Bosnian identity during the formative period of national emancipation in the Balkans—I explore the ‘memory of activism’ of Jukić in Yugoslav and Franciscan historiographies, biographies, novels, and dramas. In conclusion, I reflect on Jukić’s legacy in shaping broader Yugoslav socialist culture and the anti-nationalist profile of the Franciscan province Bosna Srebrena, whose members continue to challenge the democratic deficit in post-war Bosnia and Herzegovina. I particularly underline that Jukić disregarded abstract theological knowledge, considering it useless for revolutionary politics. Nonetheless, his insistence on political praxis and political-historical salvation strongly resonates with twentieth-century Latin American liberation theologians and offers strategies to rethink the role of historicity and collective memory in Christian traditions and theologies.