Today, disappearance occurs at individual, collective, and mass levels—across international borders and within internal frontiers—shaping new regimes of destruction, displacement and destitution of life, its infrastructures, and the traces that make such vitality legible.
Considering this present, the panel proposes to examine disappearance through contested landscapes of memory. Following the archaeology of memory work (Benjamin 1932), we approach disappearance as remnant, the landscape as witness, and the archive as a site of disjunction. We unveil mechanisms of the disappearance dispositif (Calveiro 2022), while identifying different processes that operate over time in the spaces where disappearance has been inscribed: places of massacre, grief, and collective care; topographies of erasure, silencing, and abandonment; disputed and extra-legal territories of extractivist economies; and sites of unrest that dislocate social pacts of silence, impunity, as well as the absence of accountability.
In this context, the panel asks what uses, populations, and processes—human and more-than-human—interact with haunting landscapes? What disappears along with the disappeared, and what remains? What knowledge and technologies enable us to perceive the traces on the land? What modes of resistance, new political imaginations and geographies can be discerned through reading the traces that remain, using itineraries of the senses? (Castillejo-Cuéllar 2023)
In cases of disappearance, the immediate concern is to prevent the vanished from disappearing entirely—finding forms of representation that render their absence present and their presence absent, a paradox we discern in the many afterlives of disappearance. When much time has passed and searches are on-going, the capacity to name and understand the experience of being missed and missing both shapes and disrupts expressions of the past in the present, shifting landscapes, political power struggles, official memorial cultures and technologies.
Starting from the premise that the search for meaning around enforced disappearances cannot offer a totalizing promise, this panel shares methodological and conceptual insights from on-going collective explorations that approach disappearance through the minutiae of everyday life, ordinary knowledge, and the layered, multi-scalar, relational materiality of landscapes. Thus the panel will consider new approaches to disappearance and its afterlives, particularly through sensorial itineraries, aiming to enrich the complex literature on “the disappeared” by addressing broader questions of disappearance which incorporate explorations of ecological and topographical contexts as well as the diverse temporalities disappearance traverses.
The papers in this panel engage with these questions in different settings from Palestine/Israel, South Africa, Iran, and Chile. Drawing from diverse disciplines—history, anthropology, sociology, literary and film studies—and employing a diverse range of methods—from archival work, state exhumations, social and visual media and poetry, to sensorial ethnography and autoethnography—the panelists will explore the politics and poetics of reading traces, sensory cartographies, and diverted technologies amidst the current weakening of public, democratic and multilateral institutions. In this way, the panel asks how our respective approaches might surface a different form of mnemonic activism; one which orients us towards reclaiming a democratic emancipatory politics that affirms the rights and indivisibility of the human and environment in on-going pursuits of justice.
Oriana Bernasconi, Institute of Applied Ethics, UC- Chile "Altered Landscapes and diverted Technologies in search of Chile’s Detained‑Disappeared: Multiscale disturbances in the encounter of Scientific and Judicial Truth" For over 50 years, relatives, forensic teams, and activist scientific groups have adapted working, domestic, and scientific technologies to locate people detained, executed, and disappeared during the Chilean dictatorship (1973–1990) across this long country’s varied ecosystems. This paper examines disappearance through two intertwined objects: the technologies used to locate the hiding places of those bodies, and the landscapes altered by concealment practices, which in turn shape the technologies needed to reveal them. Drawing on a multiscale approach and analysis of visual and topographic records, judicial files, and interviews, we reconstruct how, over the past forty years, an archaeologist who studies cultural remains of Chilean indigenous peoples adapted his professional practice to help locate detainees disappeared, and how a microbial ecologist who studies microorganisms in the northern salt flats transferred her methods to identify clandestine burial sites and thereby establish the final fate of disappeared persons. In these diverted trajectories, technologies—ground-penetrating radar, sieves—activate landscapes' archival potential and recover corporeal remnants of the missing—DNA, body oil. We argue that scientific truth deciphers landscapes’ multiple languages while offering judicial truth what it most lacks: certainty about sites of execution and disappearance. That certainty, however, reconfigures judicial evidentiary units—from whole bodies to trace remnants such as body oil or DNA. Together, scientific and judicial truths make possible the formulation of a public, state-level truth.
Maryam Adjam, Uppsala University
“Reading Traces: The Afterlife of the Missing”
In the context of state-sanctioned violence disappearance is not only used as means of oppression, but also as a technology rendering meanings and senses ambiguous, emptying them of their reality (Sá Cavalcante Schuback & Marder 2022). Hence voicing disappearance requires new methods of sensing and rendering the missing legible, finding new ways to articulate this “dis-language” (Gatti 2014). Reflecting on the ways that disappearance as presence absence is evoked in the cityscape through the act of remembrance, this paper outlines the convergence between landscapes as archives of embodied memory practices and landscapes subjected to memory regimes. Focusing on sites associated with the missing, political dissidents victims of state sanctioned violence in Iran during the 1980s, the paper investigates the notion of afterness in relation to the memories of the missing and the space it evokes in the everyday life of the city. Being a battlefield of traces left and erased, traces speaking and mute, these sites both encapsulate different and overlapping historical representations of the past, the memory politics articulated through these representations, as well as evoking a space of embodied memories bringing the missing to the fore as present absence. Tales of absences are rarely plain stories, but rather emerge as traces of ambivalence, speaking through the gaps and in-betweens, rendering a landscape of vibrant materiality, enacting the memory of the missing as an experience of being missed, an experience of an entirety lacking. (Bennett 2010) Using sensorial itineraries as method, opening up for uncertainty as an affective dimension of the place, the analysis focuses on how absence is sensed and evoked through the temporary constellations memories assemble in the place and how the act of remembrance embodies a history of absences. (Castillejo-Cuéllar 2022)
Rodrigo Suárez Madariaga "Have I, by chance, turned into a desert? The Atacama Desert as a document of enforced disappearance in Chile" In 1973, following the coup d'État in Chile, the Atacama Desert was used to murder and disappear left-wing activists. Fifty years later, children of those detained disappeared by the dictatorship are still searching for their parents in the driest desert of the world. Through extended fieldwork since 2020, I have been systematizing information related to this case and helping to gather children of the disappeared from Tocopilla, which has resulted in the establishment of the Association of Relatives of Victims of Tocopilla. The organization initiated a new judicial investigation in order to investigate places in the desert as potential hiding places for bodies. I have followed and supported this investigation by organizing meetings, documentary archives and field searches. This paper examines the relationships between the Atacama desert landscape, documentation practices, and post-dictatorial dynamics in Chile, focusing on the transitional justice mechanism of searching for disappeared detainees in the Atacama Desert. This search involves relatives' organizations, the judiciary, and the State, along with the desert as a relational space affected by violence (Díaz and Suárez, 2024). Within and from the desert, relatives of the disappeared seek to produce evidence to advance the search for their loved ones, establish the circumstances of death, and contribute to the pillars of truth, justice, and reparation. Recognizing the potential effects and affects of the agency of the desert in relation to the judiciary, the relatives of disappeared detainees, the State, and the bones of the victims; this work proposes an ontological turn in the documentary practice of transitional justice.
Nicky Rousseau, UWC
"Acts of Memory: Itineraries of (Dis)appearance"
1997. A leaked amnesty application of South Africa’s truth commission (TRC) details five men's disappearance—interrogated, killed, and burned at an abandoned rural police station. A photo: Women casting flowers into a river where perpetrators allegedly disposed of ash and bone. For transitional justice, this could be titled 'River of Time.' The men's fate, previously neither alive nor dead,now known, supposedly bringing some 'closure' by binding boundless imaginaries, allowing families to 'move forward' into that river of time.
What followed: Amnesty denied. Exhumation. Failed prosecution.
2025. A commission of enquiry to probe government's failure to prosecute such TRC cases. Central to this failure, a list of 300 "prosecution-ready cases." But the list is missing, perhaps itself disappeared—what Anstett (2023) calls "silent stock." The list — or its spectre — reputedly handed to government, languished in oblivion before entering public discourse, then accumulating potency. For victims, families, the list evidences the disappearance of an imagined future with answers, consequences, punishment. Impunity forges unbreakable fidelity to the struggle for legal justice in memory of victims.
The commission and a renewed initiative to prosecute will continue. But is it only the crime that demands justice? What exactly was disappeared, from whom? Congeries — material, intangible, imaginal, the being-in-relation of people, other-than-human things, experiences, dreams. Could it be the absence of this enquiry that activates a different spectre? Might memory-work host such an enquiry, respond to this moment — past and present ?
Minor acts of memory from the margins. Aesthetic practices of ‘being with’ and in-relation-to. Activations that, following Gordon (2011), gesture to 'something [else] to be done.’ A justice oriented to the future, both political and emancipatory, that tears time, allowing multiple temporalities to seep in.
20260729T140020260729T1530America/Argentina/Buenos_Aires2.5. Haunting landscapes: Ways of knowing and sensing the afterlives of disappearanceSV204MSA Buenos Aires 2026buenosairesconference@memorystudiesassociation.org
