DIGITAL
THE MISSING MONUMENT
The Missing Monument is a digital artwork dedicated to the families of persons who went missing during the conflicts of Abkhazia and South Ossetia in the 1990s and 2008.
According to the ICRC’s official data, there are 2’352 persons whose fate and whereabouts are still unknown. The Missing Monument aims at commemorating them but instead of directly recalling the names of the missing ones, this project focuses on the intimate experience of those who stayed behind and are in a permanent state of waiting and missing those who are gone. Beyond this context, the exhibition intends to pay tribute to families from all over the world, whose loved ones have gone missing in other situations, times, and places.
ARTS & CRAFTS
Dolls supporting families in the search for their loved ones
These dolls are just a few centimetres long. You could fit three, five or even ten in the palm of your hand. They are made out of colourful fabrics, paper, twigs and yarn. In some parts of Guatemala, before going to bed, children tell these dolls everything that worries them and keeps them up at night – whatever makes them feel sad and afraid. The dolls take in the children’s worries and help them sleep tight; all they have to do is place the dolls under their pillow (that’s why they are called “worry dolls”, or muñecas quitapenas in Spanish).
Empty Chairs, Waiting Families
“Empty Chairs, Waiting Families” is a memorialization project that started in 2016 as a collaboration between the ICRC, ACT for the Disappeared, and Artichoke Studio. The empty chairs, symbolizing the empty spaces that the missing left behind, were designed and painted by the brothers, sisters, mothers, fathers, wives, daughters, sons, and even grandchildren of people who went missing during armed conflicts since 1975. The sessions of this project helped keep the memory of the missing persons alive by telling their stories and spreading awareness within society about the plight of the families of the missing.
Painting
Women - Syria/Jordan Psychosocial support for Mothers of Missing Persons
In 2022, 30 mothers of missing persons benefited from psychosocial support sessions provided by the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC). These sessions contributed to enabling the mothers of missing persons to regain their ability to continue their lives and overcome the “freezing state” from which they were suffering.
In the video, we collaborated with a Syrian artist to paint this painting that expresses psychosocial support sessions.
#InternationalDay of the Missing
Colibri: A Mural for the Missing
A group of renowned street artists gathered in Phoenix to produce a mural that draws inspiration from the pursuit of immigrant rights.
The inspiration came from the film Who is Dayani Cristal?, a documentary that retraces the steps of the migrant trail in Central America in an effort to identify a body discovered in the Sonoran desert.
The work of helping families find the bodies of missing migrants is exactly what the nonprofit Colibrí Center for Human Rights in Tucson does, as well as providing counseling and advocacy services.
CHANTAL MEZ - THE STATE OF DISAPPEARANCE PROJECT
This Project brings art into conversation with academics & advocacy groups to raise awareness and instigate public debate. Addressing themes of enforced disappearance, feminicide, slavery, genocide and indigenous persecution, it responds to the most pressing concerns facing our shared humanity.
This initial impetus project was conceived back in 2017 as a result of responding to the violence of disappearance, which had become an everyday reality in Chantal's home country of Mexico. As she began her own witnessing to this through art, our subsequent discussions raised a number of crucial questions for us. Not least: - How can we do justice to a shattering absence? How could we bring our own grammatical tools to bare on a problem that took us beyond the threshold of intelligibility? What could political philosophy say when confronting the limits of language and what could art say when all presence is being denied?
Photography
Emily Pederson - The Disappeared
This portrait series shows the Ayotzinapa students who were attacked and disappeared by police on September 26, 2014 in Iguala, Guerrero.
The faces of the 43 missing young men were pasted on walls and streets across Mexico with the demand, "They took them alive, we want them back alive."
At the Ayotzinapa Teachers College in the town of Tixtla, Guerrero, where the students were studying, classroom chairs representing each of the 43 missing students - and the three students murdered in the attacks - fill the basketball court. They serve as memorials where their family members leave candles, gifts, notes.
These images were made at the school and in towns around Guerrero and Chiapas.
Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo: Photographs of 30 Years in Struggle
A Few Words
Like green leaves among dry leaves, the photographs in this book change their colours. These images honour those women who, some times without even knowing they were going to be grandmothers, set on an inconceivable journey the very same day of the abduction of their daughters and sons, and of their born or yet-to-be-born grandsons and granddaughters. The dictatorial tragedy that devastated Argentina struck their bodies with great strength and the most essential ties were severed: the ties of blood. The eternal crime of denying the true identity of their children made these grandmothers feel compelled to compulsorily abandon the domestic sphere and begin a public struggle. The Abuelas started a formidable task after understanding that even though they had their children’s bedrooms clean and a cigarette packet that had just been bought, waiting for the return of the disappeared was pointless and talking to the authorities was useless. At the risk of being swallowed by the horror machine operated by the government, their collaborative work over all these years has honoured life and has gained worldwide recognition...
- Alejandro Reynoso
FILM
HIVE
Sundance triple award winner HIVE is a searing drama directed by Blerta Basholli based on the true story of Fahrije, who, like many of the other women in her patriarchal village, has lived with fading hope and burgeoning grief since her husband went missing during the war in Kosovo. In order to provide for her struggling family, she pulls the other widows in her community together to launch a business selling a local food product. Together, they find healing and solace in considering a future without their husbands—but their will to begin living independently is met with hostility. The men in the village condemn Fahrije’s efforts to empower herself and the women around her, starting a feud that threatens their newfound sovereignty—and the financial future of Fahrije’s family. Against the backdrop of Eastern Europe’s civil unrest and lingering misogyny, Fahrije and the women of her village join in a struggle to find hope in the face of an uncertain future.
Winner of the Audience Award, Directing Award, and World Cinema Grand Jury Prize at Sundance, HIVE is a pithy, devastating portrait of loss and our uphill journeys to freedom.
#387
On 18 April 2015, a nameless boat sank off the coast of Libya, killing an estimated 800 migrants. It was the worst tragedy in the mediterranean since World War II. The Italian government took the unprecedented decision to surface the wreck and try to identify the victims.
Cristina Cattaneo leads the identification operation. A hoodie, pants, a belt. That’s what’s left of ’Number 387’. From an examination of bones, 3D reconstruction, and cross-checking DNA, Cristina and her team will do everything possible to name each shipwrecked number. In Greece, Pavlos Pavlidis has been working to identify anonymous migrants’ bodies for 17 years. Today, like Cristina, he is one of the representatives of the ICRC for the identification of Mediterranean victims.
In the coming months, they will make every possible effort to name each shipwrecked number. Who are they? Who are we?
WHO IS DAYANI CRISTAL?
The body of an unidentified immigrant is found in the Arizona Desert. In an attempt to retrace his path and discover his story, director Marc Silver and Gael Garcia Bernal embed themselves among migrant travelers on their own mission to cross the border, providing rare insight into the human stories which are so often ignored in the immigration debate.
THE OFFICIAL STORY (1985)
Winner of Best Foreign Language Picture at the 1986 Academy Awards, THE OFFICIAL STORY is about an upper middle class couple who lives in Buenos Aires with an illegally adopted child. The mother, Alicia (Norma Aleandro), comes to realize that her daughter may be the child of a desaparecido, a victim of the forced disappearances that occurred during Argentina's last military dictatorship.
Directed by Luis Puenzo.
