A reflection on the plight of the Mothers of the Disappeared in Argentina, whose sons’, daughters’, husbands’ fate is known but whose bodies will never be returned. They have nothing to bury.

This is a sculpture of the space of a human being.
I have disappeared a body.

I exhibited this at 5:1 in 2009 — the final show of my degree in typography at London College of Communication.

dis•ap•pear
v. intr.
To pass out of sight; vanish.
To cease to exist.
v. tr.
To cause (someone) to diappear, especially by kidnapping or murder.
Amnesty International.
The Day of the Disappeared.

...”enforced disappearance“ is considered to be the arrest, detention, abduction or any other form of deprivation of liberty by agents of the State or by persons or groups of persons acting with the authorization, support or acquiescence of the State, followed by a refusal to acknowledge the deprivation of liberty or by concealment of the fate or whereabouts of the disappeared person, which place such a person outside the protection of the law.
International convention for the protection of all persons from enforced disappearance.
Article 2.

From the moment of their abduction, the victims lost all rights. Deprived of all communication with the outside world, held in unknown places, subjected to barbaric tortures, kept ignorant of their immediate or ultimate fate, they risked being either thrown into a river or the sea, weighted down with blocks of cement, or burned to ashes.
Ernesto Sabato.
Nunca Mas (Never Again).
Report of Conadep (National Commission on the Disappearence of Persons), 1984. Prologue.

We have grown strangely used to them over the last 25 years, those women with a small photo pinned to their dark dresses... asking at least for a body to bury, asking that they be allowed to start mourning their dead.
Tandeciarz, Silvia R.
Mnemonic hauntings: photography as art of the missing.