Introduction

In these days in which existence is akin to making us visible and we have proneness to mediatized exposure, global unrest gives evidence of how we have condemned our senses to the obvious, noisy and tumultuous. The sovereignty we have granted to the visible is indicative of our ineptitude to respect our lives, account for our history and dismantle Anthropocentrism. In 2018, in the context of the dystopian exhibition After the End of The World, Professor McKenzie Wark delivered a speech entitled ‘The Drunken Driver: Thoughts on a waning civilisation’ in which he argued about the possibility that the corporate–robotic–information complex that drives our lives could likely be in the hands of a drunk driver. A driver driving fast and reckless, unable to read the warning signs and red lights as it accelerates for the cliff. A driver totally unaware of the consequences, negligent and careless about the lives they are putting in danger. Through this metaphor, Wark explains the magnitude of the crisis and the disappearance of the world we once knew, alerting us of the pressing need for understanding the collateral effects that are taking place. Although facts, figures and metaphors seem to be effective, attending to the increasing demonstrations and movements that alert about all sorts of disappearances – species go extinct, icebergs melt, migrants perish in the sea, armed conflicts destroy lives and cultures and so forth – the truth is that ‘Anthropocene cannot visualize itself’ (Mirzoeff 2014: 217) although its authority can be felt across the world.

Anthropocene visualization problem clashes with the overwhelming mediatized world – a world that is fully dedicated to producing images and stories that circulate and keep us subjugated, as if we were sitting in the back seat of the drunk driver’s car. Despite the amount of information that we consume and manage, we seem unable to take the reins of our own evolution, and, thus, of our own history. Yet, narratives are the only way we have to explain our world and get the information to make decisions and intervene in it; because ‘stories have a performative nature; they can enact and not just describe things – even if there are of course limits to what they are capable of enacting’ (Zylinska 2014: 11). Moreover, humans mainly care about the stories we tell ourselves. The defiance here consists in providing an ethical viewpoint to create narratives that avoid apportioning blame and proposing individualist solutions, and that focus on our shared responsibilities instead. Narratives that escape from the primacy of the big, impactful and effortless and respect the intimate, insignificant and neglected; narratives based on a counter-visuality of our own standpoint as living humans. Indeed, narratives that revisit the sense of the self always in relation to the world and beyond.

It is precisely in this conflicting state of affairs that disappearance emerges as an alternative approach to put critical pressure on the construction of life, as it defies the visual, continuous and iterative forms of representation. Disappearance and its paradoxical manifestations – voluntary or forced – touch off delicate and thoughtful dramaturgies of the isolated, hidden or unconnected. Through its always fragmented and elusive stories and actions, a process of shared ‘attunement’ emerges, providing healing scenarios of dissent. In other words, the narratives of disappearance contribute to reconfigure and expand the sense of history and life as they accept its nuances and need for fiction for the past, present and future events. In this issue, we explore how these narratives re-establish cosmopolitanism as they become examples of the praxis of the political (Zarka 2014), that is, they untangle the effects of our daily ‘performance’.

In the opening essay, José A. Sánchez explores the paradoxes of disappearance, allowing the reader of this issue to understand the approaches and subtleties that emerge in the events and practices addressed. According to Sánchez, there is an active and a passive disappearance; the first expresses dissent while the second operates with exclusion and is also a symptom of it. In other words, while active disappearance interacts with the visible as a way to disturb the values of the neoliberal way of living, passive disappearance puts forward forms of exclusion based on the deprivation of presence in its multiple forms and spheres. In any case, disappearance involves the experience of a liminal space in which even the silenced, extinct or dead announce the power of the powerless. It operates in blurred, imperfect and forgotten territories restoring life through dissent, in opposition to the violent hegemony of the visible.

Disappearances draw poetic sceneries made of traces, evanescent memories and even imperceptible scars as materialized in the essays of Edwin Culp and Beth Weinstein. Both authors question visual language and stress the forensic need to investigate beyond the layers of what is visible. Culp focuses on the relationship between violence and landscape images in Latin America through the figure of the desaparecido. Desaparecidos are scattered across clandestine graves; bodies are often found incomplete and mixed, creating a ghostly sense of commonality that comes into being in demonstrations of the living, although the landscape – visual but also political – seems to deny its very existence. Likewise, Weinstein excavates, using forensic architecture techniques, the landscapes of internment camps to render the invisible visible through performances of spatial labour. The dismantled architecture of camps and the disguise to cover graves gives evidence of a physical but also historical banishment that is numbed by what can be captured at first sight. For those alive and for those who never witness these disappearances, a sense of uprooting emerges. There is no space, no recognizable remains or ruins that account for the past, therefore, we are not capable of understanding the world that surrounds us anymore (Virno 2003).

Our difficulty to make sense of our world might have its origin in our tendency to create simplistic versions of the events to conform history – ignoring the quandaries and the small gestures that brought us here. A call to re-account history can be found in the essays of Krassimira Kruschkova, Hélia Marçal and Maite Garbayo-Maeztu. The authors reveal, through processes of re-enactment, recomposition and archiving, the silenced or hidden narratives of dictatorship, power abuse and human rights violations. They advocate for the polychromies of history addressing performances and choreographies that navigate between the figurative and the literal, focusing on the inconsistencies and complexities that surround periods of conflict and dictatorship. Hence, Kruschkova focuses on the work Archive by the Israeli artist Arkadi Zaides that wishes to address from an alternative approach the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Zaides with the support of Camera Project – which distributes video cameras to Palestinians in high-conflict areas to document human rights violations and expose the reality of life under occupation – explores the gestures that compose violence. Kruschkova discusses the meaning of ‘perspective’ and the paradoxes in an archive that researches modes of disappearance through the geopolitical deterritorialization of the image and through the cloudiness of the author, that is both present but hidden behind the camera.

While Kruschkova focuses on a still latent conflict, Marçal and Garbayo provide routes of subterfuge to the twentieth-century dictatorships of Portugal and Spain. Marçal analyses the historicization and archiving impossibilites of the performance artworks created during the Portuguese dictatorship (1933–74); these being dormant and even unsubscribed to any specific movement in art history. She advocates for the need to restore these historical gaps and grievances by enhancing the practices of diffraction (Barad 2007) and participation. From her side, Garbayo focuses on the happenings of the Catalan artists Gonçal Sobrer and Fina Miralles that explored forms of reenactment to make the dead appear. She explores the subjectivations and vulnerabilities that emerge in the process of embodying the other while throwing light on those bodies that are still waiting to be uncovered and identified. Bodies that, four decades later, are waiting to be officially acknowledged as disappeared. In other words, she claims for the communal responsibility to build an inclusive history in which all the bodies can be present.

The potential to scrutinize the violence and the figures of the desaparecidos in Latin America intersect in the essays of Alejo Medina, Livia Daza-Paris and Geraldine Lamadrid Guerrero. They focus on performance and participatory practices to critically address the systematic and even normalized violence, that is both perpetrated in bodies but also in the narratives attached to the death of the desaparecidos that historically the state prefers to ignore or silence. Medina carefully depicts Lukas Avedaño’s performances Buscando a Bruno (In Search of Bruno) and Llamando a la autoridad (Appealing the Authorities) in which the Zapotec artist denounces the disappearance of his youngest brother Bruno. The performances are bodily political acts in which traditional Muxhe poetics and rituals give visibility to the disappeared. Using practice-based research methods Daza-Paris and Lamadrid Guerrero explore the intricacies of witnessing and recovering the missing. Through dialogical processes they provide comprehensive ways to question the past and alternative ways to mobilize communities in the present. While Daza-Paris investigates the political disappearance of her father in Venezuela to stress public historical amnesia, Lamadrid Guerrero explores three episodes of violence and impunity in Xalapa (Mexico) in different historical contexts of the twentieth and twenty-first century. Next to the need to articulate and give visibility to grief and loss what all these projects have in common is their capacity to build a counter-narrative; they award power to the disappeared by making them still present and not allowing them to be fully dead.

Gargi Bharadwaj and Anita E. Cherian address episodes of genre violence in India. For them, it is impossible for performance to compete with the penetration, swift movement, scale and reach of media. However, they argue that it is within its limitations where it can trigger its subversive strengths. This is the reason why performance, through its elusive and fragile nature, has the capacity to contend and raise attention to what is neglected, obscure or forgotten. Performance is the medium through which stories about sexual violence against women in India find a context to be addressed and analysed thanks to its capacity to rematerialize and mobilize affect. On her side, Helen Murphy examines the biographical files of Maud Allan, the Canadian dancer and pianist, that played along with customs in her shows. Through the analysis of these materials, she tries to reveal the genre conventions and affects hidden in the anecdotes captured in magazines and newspapers of the period. Thus, Maud’s legacy is devised to disclose its figure and the relevance of her work.

As seen in these previous examples, the status of disappeared is discontinuous; both the dead and the alive have the intermittent quality to become ghosts. Hence, ghosts inhabit the physical and virtual daily spaces appearing and disappearing through data, objects and relationships. Sebastian Althoff refers to this idea through the digital works of Hito Steyerl in which the subject becomes empowered because it is capable of hiding in-between the mechanisms of the digital grid. In other words, the subject becomes powerful not due to its active resistance but rather due to its capacity to disappear and hide within the matrix of data, avoiding any kind of surveillance. Michael Eades uses objects to narrate the ghostly legacies of those gone instead. He navigates within the personal objects and projects of the Opies couple (being Iona Opie, his grandmother). His position as both researcher-practitioner and relative triggers a ‘surrealist ethnography’ as he is constantly played by the discovery and the familiarity of the objects in the house. The dead reappear in the process of dismantling, organizing and exploring all sorts of items. Likewise, the idea of the living as ghosts is addressed in Chris Green and Katheryn Owens’s artist pages. The ghostly is a quality that emerges due to neoliberalism as it brings isolation, precarity and individualism. The ghost is stuck within times and spaces and is unable to share the present with the other livings; it cannot fully participate in society as it has been forced to remain invisible. But the invisibility is a quality that can be also understood as a status of dissidence.

In this same line of thinking, the practitioner-researcher Ignacio de Antonio Anton delves into the subversive nature of disappearance in contexts of censorship and repression. As dance is based on radical present and occurs within its own disappearance, it has a clear potential to produce new directions for a distinctly different future. In other words, it is within the same choreographic practice that new agencies can emerge, having effects beyond their own happening. Choreographically reconfiguring what is coming is a way to defy power structures and their precise and organized machinery of production and, thus, the future. Isis Saz and Leyla Dunia, in their artists’ pages, explore the textile poetic dramaturgies of disappearance that take place in the same act of weaving. According to them, weaving works as a critical instrument as it both involves the disappearance of the author and problematizes historical and identitarian complexities related to labour, gender and indigenous traditions. Moreover, contemporary artistic practice has been gradually incorporating the power of weaving to contain and communicate artistic statements, constantly questioning the canons of validation between art and crafts. Hence, the tissue constitutes a vehicle for knowledge exchange, a space for dignification of labour and an act of resistance in which the action of weaving subverts the sense of its former confinement.

The reign of the visual is challenged by artworks that focus on sound. Audio installations, in which there is something that we cannot see but just hear, reconfigure our relationship with the visible. Moreover, they stress the disappearance of our capacity to critically analyse what we can clearly see, and they help us to understand that disappearance is both inevitable and subversive. Georgina Guy analyses Lawrence Abu Hamdan’s Saydnaya (the missing 19db) (2017) in which the artist invites the audience to visualize through sound and speech an inaccessible prison located near Damascus. A place wherein detainees are held in near total darkness and a regime of enforced silence. Prisoners are forced to partly use their senses so they cannot render a shared imaginary of the place. Guy explains how Abu Hamdan challenges this regime of omitted visibility, producing a legible account through different testimonials. By providing an emerging legibility of the testimonials’ experience through sound the artist prevents stories from disappearing. Likewise, Ixiar Rozas Elizalde points out the imperative to restore the value of silence as its extinction would mean the disappearance of authentic communication. Hence, she argues through different artistic examples how poetics can only emerge within the uniqueness and transcendence of silence. Silence has the capacity to convey meaning beyond the semantic and consequently cross other artistic forms and provide hope for what is to come.

This capacity of subverting the power of the visual and the body through sound frames the works of the artist Jaume Ferrete-Vázquez. According to him, traditional reproduction of sound was based on repetition, making evident the need of a body to produce variations and demonstrating, at the same time, its limitations. Through his own works Ferrete-Vázquez announces how speech synthesis provides both an additional degree of autonomy to produce utterances and expand voices in unexpected ways. The body reaches new spaces through its mediatized disappearance. Following this same idea, Rodrigo Parrini and Patricio Villarreal Ávila shed light on the implications of bodiless relationships that emerge within a context of global transactions and exchanges. In Teatro Ojo’s Deux Ex Machina, a call-centre is set up inside a theatre venue in Mexico City. Telephone numbers from a commercial database are contacted with the aim to start an in-depth conversation concerning historical, regional and daily aspects about Mexico. Anonymous citizens on the other side engage in an expected relationship with the interviewer that is on the other side of the line, yet created to disappear. The conversations appear as aesthetic intervals that divert the course of events and alter power relations.

Disappearance from an ecological perspective is addressed by Sarah Wade in her essay about the latest works of Marcus Coates in which the artist explores with humour the subject of extinction. Through the analysis of Coates’s works Wade provides an approach of how satire, absurdity and irreverence can both tackle serious issues and raise ecological awareness from an unconventional point of view. In this regard, the disappearance of species is also linked to alteration that habitats suffer due to human intervention. For his part, Asli Uludag addresses the changes in the landscape due to the use of hydroponics to increase the production of crops. Hydroponics is a way to reorganize and systematize the environment to respond to market demands, especially with the construction of large amounts of greenhouses that make the original land disappear.

In the editorial process of this issue, we realized that disappearances call for our attention – a vital attention that is disappearing. This oxymoron is key to overcoming the effects of Anthropocentrism as disclosed in the essay of Jelena Vesić. She unfolds through Freedom Landscapes, an installation by the performance theorist Ana Vujanović and filmmaker Marta Popivoda, the importance of attention to make sense of our present. The artwork is concerned with the suppressed histories of Yugoslav women partisans creating atmospheres and affects that hold all that has been disregarded. Vesić effectively makes us understand that we need to retrieve our state of attentiveness based on our capacity to be courteous, perceptive and proactive. As she stresses, our main challenge is to battle an attention based on a succession of never-ending distractions of this era of post-attention result of overexposure to inputs and a frantic way of life.

While our lives are full of multi-tasking, distractions and anxieties that take us nowhere, the drunk driver of the Anthropocentrism is approaching the cliff, announcing our own disappearance. This issue aims to shed light on all the things we are missing and all the things we have missed for not having the time to tell us the stories that we need to share to understand the world.