"A disappearance is real only when it is apparitional.″
(Avery Gordon)
Whenever something can be seen in an image, something else disappears. And yet, its absence remains present. How is it that we sense something not only despite, but precisely because it keeps being concealed? How can something be unseeably visible?
Making people disappear is a common, violent practice in the context of past and present armed conflicts in Lebanon and Colombia. Not only people, but also their traces, recollections, and landscapes holding their bodies have been made invisible as a strategy of erasure and oblivion, leading to an all-encompassing concealment of information, images, archives, meanings and layers of reality.
Claudia Salamanca (Colombia) and Ghassan Halwani (Lebanon) propose artistic interventions in this void. Their essay films challenge the fragile balance of absence and presence in visual representation, unsettling scars and memories. They provide different figurations and transformations of visible absence, understanding imagination as a gesture of thinking the absence as image.
ERASED, ___ASCENT OF THE INVISIBLE, dir: Ghassan Halwani, Lebanon 2018, 76’
30 SECONDS, dir: Claudia Salamanca, Colombia 2010, 8’
MATERIAL EVIDENCE, dir: Claudia Salamanca, Colombia 2010, 8’
ECONOMÍAS DE IMÁGENES DE LA GUERRA, dir: Claudia Salamanca, Colombia 2019, 9’
Discussion with Ghassan Halwani, Claudia Salamanca, Fabienne Liptay & Eduardo Jorge de Oliveira (tbc)
Funded by: Epistemologies of Aesthetic Practices; Latin American Center Zurich; Zentrum Künste und Kulturtheorie
Organized by: Iris Fraueneder and María Ordóñez (University of Zurich, SNF-project "Contested Amnesia and Dissonant Narratives in the Global South")