Mahmoud Keshavarz

To cross the heavily monitored borders and reach Europe, illegalised travellers are forced to make themselves invisible to border guards and surveillance technologies. Yet, every year, thousands–without identity documents and without protection from any state–disappear during crossings made perilous by European border regimes and policies. States frequently fail, refuse or even obstruct families’ effort to search for their loved ones, making tracing and identification extremely difficult. In the absence of state support, families, friends, and activists take on the responsibility of finding any trace of the missing. 

This project explores the struggles and strategies of families, activists, and civil society organisations in searching for the missing migrants and how they actively develop new methods for search and identification. Grounded in a multimodal ethnography and in collaboration with Border Forensics, a research agency mobilizing innovative methods of spatial and visual analysis to investigate practices of border violence, the aim is to understand the technological, material, visual, as well as social and political practices that evoke a kind of perceptibility grounded in the absence of bodies and persons.