There is an emerging recognition that missing, disappeared, and dead bodies from conflict and state violence have complex ‘afterlives’ that may reverberate for decades or even centuries. Far from being inert or politically insignificant, these absent bodies are imbued with a form of power that can disrupt the social life of families and communities as well as the political order. Some describe such absent bodies as possessing a form of agency or performativity in the way they haunt the living and the present, producing powerful affects, and activating their ‘re presencing’ as incomplete, elusive, and residual traces (Fowles 2010: 28; Meyer 2012: 104; Huttunen 2024; Stepputat). Traces of the absent may become materially present through practices of searching for human remains, and through inscriptions on graves, lists of names and numbers, photos, clothing, as well as through artwork, memorials, cemeteries, museums. Traces of the absent may also re emerge in a symbolic form, through memory work, spiritual rituals, visitations, dreams, or ghostly apparitions, or through the affect that circulates in specific spaces. Finally, traces of the absent re emerge in political projects and forms of memory activism that mobilise the productive power of ‘ambiguous loss’ to call for accountability or refuse the ordering urges of the state (Robins 2024; Huttunen 2024; Rojas Perez 2017). All these traces have implications for the way we think about individual and collective memory. This panel, informed by work in diverse geographic settings impacted by conflict and state violence, seeks to locate and follow the traces of missing, dead and disappeared bodies (Meyer 2012: 103). It inquires into how, where, and why these absent bodies become present. What are the effects of the traces of absence – political, socially, and for collective memory?
Chantal Youssef "The presencing of absence in post-Assad Syria: memory practices from private to public spaces" The fall of the Assad regime exposed the vast scale of enforced disappearances and their use as a tool of repression in Syria. When the Assad regime collapsed and prisons were opened in December 2024, families of the disappeared immediately gathered on the grounds of detention centres across the country, looking through scattered documents for any traces of their relatives. Tragically, only a minor fraction of those forcibly disappeared by the Assad regime survived. Since then, photos of the disappeared have emerged in public spaces, in protests, cultural exhibitions and ‘truth tents’. This paper asks: how has the fall of the Assad regime shaped the presencing of absence amongst families of the disappeared both inside and outside of Syria; and what kind of communities of memory are formed or consolidated around these practices? This paper shows how everyday practices of accounting for the disappeared, previously shaped by stigma and fear, are relocated from private to public spaces since the fall of the Assad regime. It reflects upon the new tensions that have come with this as the “politics of reappearance” – the “polyvocal modes in which missing or disappeared persons enter political discourses” (Huttunen and Perl 2023, 16) – are (re)negotiated, and families of the disappeared asked to ‘move on’. This paper draws from participatory research conducted with Syrian women in Syria, Lebanon and Germany in 2025 as part of the SUPPSAL project, a three-year interdisciplinary collaboration between Women Now for Development, the Asfari Institute at the American University of Beirut, and the Swiss Peace Research Institute.
Rosanne Kennedy. Australian National University Remembering Indigenous Disappearances through the Visual Arts: from Settler Violence to the Deep Present The discourse on remembering the disappeared has emerged in the context of those who have been disappeared by military dictatorships in the 20th and 21st centuries. This context has shaped some of the paradigms, including concepts of archives, repertoires, haunting and afterlives that have emerged for remembering the disappeared. In this presentation, I shift the focus to disappearances of Indigenous peoples in the context of settler colonial Australia, taking Archie Moore’s powerful “kith and kin” exhibition at the Venice Biennale in 2022 as an opportunity to explore the specific affordances of the visual arts, including graphic and plastic arts, to visualize the settler state’s carceral practices in deaths and disappearances of Indigenous peoples. What is remarkable about ‘kith and kin’ is Moore’s use of graphic arts to connect identified cases of deaths in custody with a longer history of settler practices which deliberately disconnected and destroyed family ties. These include (mis)naming, family separation, and letting die, which both contributed to and actualised the dehumanization of Indigenous people, and led to physical and social deaths. Additionally, through its visual form of graphic display (representing Indigenous people as ‘flora and fauna’), Moore connects vast scales of time: spanning from disappearances in a settler context to a deep history of Indigenous presence on the continent. Developing the concepts of “scales of memory” (Kennedy and Nugent, 2016) and the “deep present” (Kennedy and Silverstein, 2023), I argue that analysis of Moore’s ‘kith and kin’ provides a basis for expanding both our vocabulary and our paradigms for studying practices of remembering the disappeared. Further, with this case study I aim to lay the groundwork for a comparative approach to disappearances is settler colonial contexts.
Lia Kent. Victoria University. Landscapes of death and disappearance in Timor-Leste and Australia: implications for memory and repair. Studies of the aftermath of war and political violence frequently note how landscapes, places and sites become imbued with atmospheres of disorder for those who have knowledge of the events that took place there. Powerful, embodied affects are provoked by these atmospheres, impacting on how such spaces are used, experienced and imagined, even in cases where evidence of that violence has been effectively obscured (Colombo and Shindel 2014: 3; Navaro et al 2021: 12). Drawing on ongoing ethnographic research in conflict-affected Timor-Leste and settler-colonial Australia, this paper explores how the specific violence of killing and disappearing bodies leaves traces in the form of potent landscapes that demand care and attention. In the aftermath of the Indonesian occupation (1975-1999), East Timorese speak of parts of the landscape as lulik (sacred/charged), haunted by the unhappy and restless spirits of those who died ‘bad’ deaths and whose bodies have not been recovered. These enspirited landscapes are said to render land difficult to cultivate, disrupt development projects, and cause dangerous motorbike accidents for those who are passing through. In Australia, landscapes of colonial frontier massacre are held by First Nations communities to be similarly potent, inhabited by restless spirits who may communicate their sorrow to those who visit these places, and demanding specific forms of protection and care. The paper asks: how might centring landscapes shed light on the entangled human and more-than-human harms of the violence of disappearance? How might this open new possibilities for understanding how violence endures across time and space? How might it provoke more expansive understandings of remembrance, repair and justice?
20260730T154520260730T1715America/Argentina/Buenos_Aires7.1. Afterlives of the dead and disappeared: the presence of absenceA112MSA Buenos Aires 2026buenosairesconference@memorystudiesassociation.org
