This cluster panel includes two interrelated panels: Panel I "Materializing Dis-/Appearances" and Panel II: Infrastructure of Dis/Appearance. The overall Panel 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.
Karen Remmler, Department of German, Amherst College -"Archiving the Dead in the Wake of Extreme Violence: Forensic Approaches to Disappeared Bodies"
This paper, builds on recent investigations conducted by the Forensic Architecture group in the Middle East, and considers how spatial archives create an alternative for remembering the dead rather than reactivate their disappearance through mass visual mediation of their remains. In her book, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being, Christine Sharpe, examines the multifaceted effects of transitions from life to death under circumstances of racial duress, injustice, and legacies of enslavement. The concept of the wake as both a ceremony of mourning and a disturbance caused by the stern of a boat provides a starting point to examine how the dead as entities in transit from life to death in the wake of extreme violence are displaced and disappeared through visual forms of mediation. This paper considers how the remains of the dead in the wake of extreme violence are often disappeared through their weaponization and mediation for purposes of inflicting further harm upon the living. Building on recent investigations conducted by the Forensic Architecture group in the Middle East, K. Remmler’s paper considers how a mediation through spatial analysis rather than the further desecration of the dead through their visual mediation as objects of media frenzy, can create an archive for remembering the dead through spatial archives of remembrance. Thus, the dead are “awakened”, rather than disappeared through the mass mediation of their remains.
Anna Brus, Department of Art History, University of Cologne/German Lost Art Foundation Martin Zillinger, Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology, University of Cologne "Provincializing Restitution. The Dis and Re appearance of Atifuak and the Struggle for Memory and Resistance at the Yuat River" This paper examines the demand for what we term reversed provenance research in relation to a so called Masterpiece of Sepik Art. During an academic exchange program, the anthropologist Alphonse Aimé from the Biwat community in Papua New Guinea identified an ancestral figure reproduced in a catalogue published by the Fondation Beyeler. This sculpture, now held at the Weltkulturen Museum in Basel, is described in museum catalogues as a “flute stopper” or wusear. It has travelled widely, and has been exhibited in London, Paris, Berlin, Brussels, Zurich, and elsewhere, and featured in several exhibition catalogues. The paper recounts a visit to the carver’s family and village community, who had lost track of the object’s whereabouts but vividly remembered its disappearance—taken by a German missionary in exchange for three pieces of soap, a newspaper, and tobacco. Its mediated reappearance in the village prompted a struggle for re relating to the ancestral figure through orally transmitted knowledge and local memory practices—both of which have been overwritten by a transnational history of colonial extraction and classification. While the object’s cultural and religious significance has persisted, its biography has, both locally and globally, been subsumed into dominant and circulating narratives of “Sepik Art“ and „Sepik Religion,” thus obscuring situated understandings of its ancestral and relational meaning. This paper discusses the ensuing controversies around religion, theft, and ownership as an archive of (deadly) transit that may have the potential to unsettle missionary, ethnographic, and museum archives, as well as the operations of the art market and auction houses, within broader transnational debates.
20260729T110020260729T1230America/Argentina/Buenos_Aires1.8. The Dis/Appeared. Agency and Presence in Archives of (Deadly) Transit I: Materializing Dis/AppearancesSV101MSA Buenos Aires 2026buenosairesconference@memorystudiesassociation.org
