STATE OF DISAPPEARANCE

Latest

News

Solo show

CentreSpace Gallery, Bristol. UK.

28th Oct / 8th Nov 2023.

About

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.

Conversation of the State of Disappearance Project by Brad Evans & Chantal Meza

Play Video

OUR PARTNERS

This initial impetus project was conceived back in 2017 as a result of responding to the violence of enforced 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?

Confronting these questions we understood demanded a collaborative response between the arts & philosophy. It also demanded a wider conversation with a community of intellectuals, who could allow us to reimagine the truly unimaginable. Recognising this, we began this journey noting that while disappearance is undoubtedly terrifying for its victims and families, there was a need to reimagine the term disappearance itself within a more considered and intimate frame. It was necessary to account for the terror which lives on in the minds of everybody it touches, not only to focus attention on the absence of bodies, but to also consider broader issues on the roles between perpetrators, victims and witnesses, onto the ways it forces a fundamental rupture in the logics of space and time. Indeed, we felt that it was only by addressing it on these terms that we might be able to ask serious questions about what role art and critical thinking have when confronting this devastating problem, which by its very definition, exceeds the limits of aesthetic and philosophical engagement on account of its very absence and denials.

THE ARTWORK

OBSCURE BEASTS

EXPLORE

SOLO EXHIBITION

28th October - 8th November 2023

The Inaugural State of Disappearance Art exhibition was held at CentreSpace Art Gallery in Bristol from October 27th to November 8th, 2023. Showcasing for the first time together, 75 dedicated works were presented dealing with the brutality of disappearance, and how it leaves its mark upon those who must live with the consequences.

Complimenting the exhibition, two weeks of events included a series of public lectures from internationally recognised speakers and leading authorities on different related issues from natural disasters, the holocaust, enforced disappearances on to slavery, dedicated panels exploring issues concerning memory & justice and student workshops exploring human disappearance.

EXPLORE

Laura

“Beautiful and mesmerising, there is an incredible suspension and frenetic energy in the work, so powerful and moving, it has inspired me to wonder how we can bring peace and grace through mutual remembering for those that have no bones to weep over. Such a moving collaboration. Thank you for your creative voice bringing forth the voiceless. So essential in these challenging times we share- deep gratitude.”

THE BOOK

State of Disappearance brings together the power of artistic testimony and witnessing with critical voices to ask deeper questions about extreme violence, the normalisation of human vanishing, state and ideological complicity, and memorialisation, along with wider concerns about what it means to be human in the twenty-first century.

EXPLORE

ART HOUSE MOVIE

"Disappearance is marked by a devastating absence. It constitutes a form of violence that rips open a wound in time. It offers no viable recovery and no meaningful justice. It provisions alibis to perpetrators, while denying the victims their very humanity. And for those who are left to live with its presence, the terror is unending".

PUBLIC TALKS

In this section you will find a digital library of filmed resources related to the State of Disappearance project.

The archive includes keynote lectures, invited talks, public interviews, plenary discussions and recorded webinars.

01:22:33

The Story of the Disappeared

The Story of the Disappeared | Professor Brad Evans & Chantal Meza. Tuesday 17th October, Queen Square, Bath. A discussion between Professor Brad Evans, and Mexican abstract painter Chantal Meza, takes the notion of the ‘disappeared’ and engages the audience in an open conversation on what might by many be considered one of the more pernicious forms of violence. Brad Evans is a political philosopher, critical theorist, and writer who specialises in the problem of violence. He is author of over twenty books and edited volumes, including most recently Ecce Humanitas: Beholding the Pain of Humanity (Columbia University Press, 2020). Forthcoming books include State of Disappearance (with Chantal Meza, McGill Queens University Press: 2023) and How Black Was My Valley (Repeater/Penguin Random House: 2024). Chantal Meza is a self-taught abstract painter living and working in the United Kingdom. Her work has featured in exhibitions, auctions and biennials in prominent museums and galleries in Mexico, Paraguay and the United Kingdom. Recently, her solo show State of Disappearance has been supported using public funding by the National Lottery through Arts Council England.

01:30:17

The Disappeared of History, a conversation with Brad Evans & Chantal Meza

How are we to bear witness to those who leave no trace? What role can politics, philosophy and art play when dealing with violence so extreme it takes us beyond all intelligible limits? And how might we recover something of the human in the face of its total annihilation? This collaborative talk will speak directly to the disappeared of history. Drawing upon our critical and artistic interventions from the State of Disappearance project, we will seek to explore the role witnessing, including the transgressive witnessing of art and how this allows for a rethinking of the political. In doing so, the talk will also provide further reflections on the ways disappearance demands considered ethical consideration on the role of perpetrators, victims, and witnesses, along with accounting for the multiple ways bodies can vanish from the surfaces of human belonging. ABOUT THE SPEAKERS Brad Evans is Professor of Political Violence & Aesthetics at the University of Bath, UK. Chantal Meza is an abstract artist whose work focuses on multiple political issues, including human disappearance. Moderated by Susanna Siegel, Edgar Pierce Professor of Philosophy at Harvard University. Recorded on 4/11/22

08 Au-delà de la vulnérabilité de l’art : confronter la violence de la disparition technologique

01:52:31

21 April 2023. Faculty of Modern Languages at Heidelberg Universität. Germany. Invited by "Un curso propio" a program of the Spanish Romances Languages. This talk was part of the Romanisches Seminar of the Sommersemester 2023. This event was possible with the support of the Centre for Apocalyptic Studies CAPAS at Heidelberg Universität.

21:04

"State of Disappearance" Workshop UCC (Ireland) 2020

Workshop on the "State of Disappearance" held at UCC, Cork, Ireland in 2020.

30:30

W&F 1/22: Täter*innen - Kunst im Heft - Chantal Meza "State of Disappearance"

W&F 1/2022: Täter*innen Jede Bebilderung der Suche nach Täter*innen, nach dem, was sie motiviert, antreibt, zu dem Akt führt, über den sie definiert werden, ist schwer. Chantal Mezas Bilder versuchen einen Blick in den Strudel der Gewalt, den Schmerz, die Ohnmacht, das betäubende Loch der Leere, das von der Gewalttat hinterlassen oder zugefügt wird. Abstrakt und doch oft verstörend konkret führt uns der Blick immer tiefer in unser eigenes Seelenleben. David Scheuing (W&F) interviewt Chantal Meza für diesen Blick hinter die "Kunst im Heft". ---------- Zum Projekt "State of Disappearance": ------------- Zur Künstlerin: Chantal Meza ist Autodidaktin in Abstrakter Malerei, und lebt und arbeitet in Großbritannien. Ihre Werke sind schon in mehr als 30 Einzel- und Gruppenausstellungen in bedeutenden Museen und Galerien in Lateinamerika und Großbritannien zu sehen gewesen. Ihre Werke werden regelmäßig für print und digitale Publikationen angefragt. Web: --------- Wissenschaft & Frieden ist die führende interdisziplinäre Wissenschaftszeitschrift für Friedensforschung, Friedenspolitik und Friedensbewegung. W&F erscheint seit 1983 und publiziert zu friedenspolitischen, militär-strategischen und rüstungstechnischen Fragen, untersucht Gewaltursachen und -verhältnisse und thematisiert Wege und Möglichkeiten zur zivilen Konfliktlösung, zur Wahrung der Menschenrechte und zur Zukunftssicherung. Web:

07:35

WEBINARS

Hosted in partnership with The Philosopher (Britain's longest running philosophy journal) a series of public "State of Disappearance" webinars have been scheduled from Oct 2023.

Each of the conversations will be published here following their recording.

The links to join the conversation will be post here 1 week before the upcoming webinar.