This cluster of two panels explores how practices of remembrance, mourning, and resistance operate during and after regimes of authoritarianism, colonialism, and surveillance, to counter the systemic disappearance of material, symbolic, and spatial archives that are in transit, both literally and figuratively. How do acts of remembrance reclaim or challenge democratic forms of agency? Through ethnographic and theoretical contributions from Morocco, Argentina, Brazil, Papua New Guinea, Spain, and the Middle East, we examine how the disappeared, absent, silenced, and/ or extracted may regain a presence through collaborative, aesthetic, and spiritual practices, even in contexts of ongoing duress. Delving both into archival materialities (panel 1) and into infrastructures that facilitate dis/appearances (panel 2), we view “archives of deadly transit” not only as repositories and transitional spaces of violence but as active sites of democratic struggle where the dead, displaced, and dispossessed continue to act in the world. Drawing from perspectives that challenge Eurocentric and institutional notions of the archive, our panel considers how material, affective, and spiritual traces can counter the epistemic and bureaucratic violence inflicted by authoritarian systems, even within postcolonial democracies, making present what was made absent.
Nina ter Laan, University of Cologne,
Luciana Serrano, Universidad Nacional de San Martin/Cooperativa Espacial
"The Democratization of Memory in Surveilled Publics: Collaborative Infrastructures of Re/Appearance in Morocco and Argentina",
In this paper Nina ter Laan and Luciana Serrano draw on a Moroccan–German–Argentine collaboration between civil society initiatives in Al-Hoceima (Rif region, Morocco) and Buenos Aires (Argentina) to examine how memory practices unfold within contexts shaped by surveillance, authoritarianism, and colonial legacies. Both sites bear the historical mark of structures of exclusion and control which continue to reverberate through contemporary regimes of (in)visibility. This paper reflects on the challenges and possibilities of working in collaboration with communities and organizations engaged in the recovery of erased or suppressed memories. Drawing on a Moroccan–German–Argentine collaboration between civil society initiatives in Al-Hoceima (Rif region, Morocco) and Buenos Aires (Argentina), it examines how memory practices unfold within contexts shaped by surveillance, authoritarianism, and colonial legacies. Both sites bear the historical mark of structures of exclusion and control, which continue to reverberate through contemporary regimes of (in)visibility. Through an ethnographic reading of two collaborative infrastructures—a MediaSpace in Al-Hoceima and the Cultura Oculta Space in Buenos Aires—the paper explores how locally anchored initiatives attempt to reclaim visibility and agency through artistic, spatial, and digital practices. These projects address difficult pasts that have been silenced, neglected, or censored, reactivating shared memories that remain entangled with communities’ identities, senses of belonging, and visions of the future. By juxtaposing these experiences, we ask how grassroots cultural infrastructures can render the disappeared present within surveilled and institutional frameworks. We argue that collaborative work across such spaces of constraint and control can foster fragile yet transformative solidarities, cultivating democratic forms of remembrance that challenge ongoing erasures and contribute to decolonial archives of presence in the Global South.
Carla Tiefenbacher, University of Cologne "Saintly Dis/appearances. Infrastructures of Catholic humanitarianism between Spain and Morocco" This paper examines the tensions between democratic promises, humanitarian practices and material Catholicism in a migrant church community in Tangier, Morocco. The paper explores representations of Catholic saints present in Tangier as an archive of dis /appearances and (deadly) transit – curated by people in transit, venerating justice, freedom and the un disappearable, and at the same time documenting the ties between Catholicism, humanitarianism and political power in the legacies of the Spanish colonial empire.A postcolonial and post Francoist presence with dwindling sociopolitical influence, the Catholic Church in Tangier, Morocco has redefined itself as a station of pilgrimage on the gateway between Africa and Europe. Its members are almost exclusively migrants – lay people from Europe migrating to Morocco for economic opportunities and from Africa hoping to cross into Europe for better futures, Spanish volunteers seeking blessing along hierarchized forms of "helping those in need", and religious orders from Iberoamerica, Europe and Africa. In the constitutionally Muslim State, believers seek out Catholic life because it carries promises to core values of democracy: to (eternal) justice, to dignity, and to social inclusion unconditional of one's legal status. Faith acts as an antidote to the constantly looming threat of disappearing: into death, depression, violence, or into social isolation, but also against the disappearance of Catholic presence and values on a global scale. Putting this belief system into practice in a highly socially inequal context, parish members relate to each other mainly through humanitarian aid. A main source of motivation and strength to engage in these emotionally exhausting aid relations are religious role models: saints. Eternally saved from disappearing through the holiness they exhibited in life, are at the same time dependent on the living.
Alessandra Praun, Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology, University of Cologne "Disappearance and Reappearance: Reclaiming Munduruku Immaterial Heritage in Ethnological Collections" investigates the disappearance and reappearance of the immaterial dimension within ethnological collections related to the belongings of the Amazonian Indigenous people Munduruku. It draws on debates about the interconnections between tangible and intangible heritage and the impossibility of fragmenting them in museological contexts—an ongoing condition that has produced erasures extending beyond issues of provenance. In resonance with the panel's focus on remembrance and resistance in contexts of disappearance, the project understands these collections as archives where violence, displacement, and silencing remain inscribed in both the material and immaterial dimensions of the belongings.
20260729T140020260729T1530America/Argentina/Buenos_Aires2.8. The Dis/Appeared. Agency and Presence in Archives of (Deadly) Transit II: Infrastructures of Dis/AppearanceSVE4MSA Buenos Aires 2026buenosairesconference@memorystudiesassociation.org
