The term ‘disappearance’ in twentieth-century Latin American contexts typically evokes a history of authoritarian governments and violent repressions, exemplified by political regimes of the Southern Cone beginning in the 1970s, extending to civil wars in El Salvador and Guatemala, to the ongoing Mexican ‘war on drugs,’ to government repression in Peru, and to the contexts of armed conflict in Colombia. As a result, ‘disappearance’ has come to inflect an extensive corpus of cultural production from the region, along with scholarship attending to the theoretical and ethical possibilities of writing, creating and thinking through the violently imposed framework of absented bodies and communities—the disappeared (D. Taylor 1997; J. Franco 2013; C. Rivera Garza 2013).

As counterpart to ‘disappearance,’ the notion of ‘appearance’ requires us to think both through and beyond the violence of disappearance, towards a broader set of meanings associated with the opposing acts of making absent and making present. Within this larger framework, ‘appearance’ and ‘disappearance’ may suggest: experimental forms of writing and related arts, such as work attentive to material traces on paper or screen, or to prosthetic relationships between bodies, texts, and other mechanisms of communication (R. Cruz Arzabal 2018; M. Schildrick 2022; K. Barad 2007); technologies of visual media, with the mimetic and poietic power to create convincing alternative worlds, or to reshape viewers’ understanding of the world they know (N. K. Hayles 2000; I. Emmelhainz 2021); or relations and hierarchies between fictional and non-fictional texts and their capacity to evoke or obscure familiar references (M. Areco, F. Moreno, C. Quintana 2024).

Combining an interest in experimental artistic production with attention to the political weight of disappearance and appearance, this panel engages with the dilemmas of making absent and making present through varied approaches, attuned to the text—whether written or photographic—as ambivalent mimetic space. Presentations attend to the question of form and the material quality of the text, interrogating the stakes and possibilities of representing ‘appearance’ and ‘disappearance,’ or working through their manifestations.

The panel begins with Emily Hind’s paper, “Grieving Disappearance: Amaury Colmenares’s Acequia, Ave Barrera’s Restauración, and the Recetario para la memoria Sinaloa and Guanajuato.” Hind focuses on the politics of disappearance in Mexico through the publication of cookbooks dedicated to disappeared people, and featuring their favorite dishes. She juxtaposes this reading with consideration of celebrated novels that propose a fictionalized approach to the theme of disappearance. In reading fiction alongside deeply personal, sensorial and non-fictional work on the painful violence of disappearance, this paper challenges the formal conventions that tend to distance literary fiction from more literal interventions. Moreover, the project highlights the uncertain role of critical appraisal in relation to diverse texts’ relative proximity to the violence they evoke.

In the second presentation, ‘El texto como espacio de desaparición en La carta sobre los ciegos para el uso de los que ven (2017) de Mario Bellatin y Conjunto vacío (2015) de Verónica Gerber Bicecci,’ Kristina Stajic examines a dynamic of appearance and disappearance in these novels, whereby a partial disappearing of the authorial figure coincides with the materialization of writing and the body. Insisting on the site of the body, often marked by trauma, as the space of community and communication, these texts reimagine relationships between written language and tangible, corporeal experience.

Rodrigo Lichtle Ventosa, the third presenter, focuses on the experimental writing of Samuel Walter Medina, in a paper titled, “Poesía Valium: una lectura de Sastrerías.” Here, writing becomes a form of vomit that fills the page, emerging as both illness and cure, even as both the blank page and the distinctions between addiction and inspiration, or medicine and sickness, begin to disappear. Lichtle Ventosa reads appearance and disappearance in terms of a pharmacological dynamic, analyzing points of contact between the violent playfulness of Medina’s experimental aesthetics and his implicit political critique.

Finally, the fourth intervention, by Paulo Andreas Lorca, “Unseen Clouds: Modernity and Invisibility in Marc Ferrez’s Skyscapes,” turns to the genre of photography in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Lorca argues that the technical effacement of clouds from Ferrez’s photographs complicates our understanding of what modernization, industrialization, and taxonomy make visible or invisible, and underscores the potential violence of this dynamic of transparency and opacity. The contexts of modernity and early photography in this presentation, when juxtaposed with presentations on more recent literature, allow us to consider how histories of form, technique and medium have continued to shape the aesthetics and politics of appearance and disappearance.