Dreams of Disappearance by Chantal Meza. Oil on linen. 120cm x 170cm. Public collection. Pembroke College. University of Oxford.

Our current media landscape is not simply characterized by an endless stream of daily content and the incessant deluge of AI slop, but by absence. News broadcasts, documentaries, social media feeds and popular culture are continually filled with stories concerning missing people, enforced disappearances, migration, war, environmental loss and digital erasure. What were previously seen as separate tragedies have now become recurring themes that influence public awareness, turning absence into a visible and marketable form of entertainment, opportunism and profitability. As these stories are continually repeated and reinterpreted on various platforms, disappearance has come to be accepted as normal, becoming part of the routine pattern of media consumption rather than being perceived as a devastation that calls for ongoing attention.

How can images of the annihilated appear side by side with celebrity news, advertisements, entertainment, and algorithmically selected content, all vying equally for our fleeting attention? No sooner are we shown films of families in search of their relatives, news accounts of refugees who have been lost at sea, fictional depictions of disappearing lives, promotional campaigns offering us all sorts of intangible products flood our minds, designed to appease the anxieties, but for a second. The line between real catastrophe and a mediated spectacle has thus disappeared altogether. In the face of this continuous flow of absence, our emotional reactions are being predetermined, shaped by repetition rather than by thoughtful consideration. Disappearance, which originally meant uncertainty and invisibility, has paradoxically become extremely visible – its constant presence embedded into the cultural fabric so that the extraordinary seems disturbingly ordinary. That which was once exceptional has become terrifyingly normal.

We keep coming back to the scenarios described above continually in our work since we believe they say more about the current condition than any single headline or grandiose political proclamation. We are no longer shown photographs of war or tragedy in the sense that once perturbed Susan Sontag. What is striking in fact is how very little we actually see of violence, compared, say, to the coverage of the Vietnam War in the late 1960s. The characteristic feature of our age is not the occurrence of catastrophe but the absences it leaves behind–the fact that there are people or things who were there and are now just not there. Not dead in any way that we can grieve or bury. Not alive in any way that we can hope for. They are suspended, unaccounted for, and unknown.

Disappearance is now the defining issue of our times. It is not violence as such, for violence has always existed, and each Century has manufactured and reproduced new and more inventive forms of barbarity and cruelty. What is different is the specific way in which people disappear the neoliberal logics that now drive it forward. Within just one generation, it has moved from the secretive language of dictatorships to become a part of everyday life in the global world.

Just think about the way that word “disappeared” would have been understood fifty years ago. To disappear was, as Joan Didion proposed, part of a particular and dreadful vocabulary – the desaparecidos of Argentina’s Dirty War, who........

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