Making the Disappeared Appear (2023) by Wantanee Siripattananuntakul

Making the Disappeared Appear reveals how war, border regimes, and state-led development reshape landscapes and living systems in northern Thailand. Rather than treating disappearance as an accidental consequence of progress, the work shows how it emerges from territorial control, militarisation, and large-scale infrastructure projects that reorganise land, labour, and ecological relations.

The five-channel installation assembles fragments unfolding at different times and under different circumstances across the Mekong River Basin. Rather than presenting animals directly, the work gathers traces through which their presence briefly re-emerges. Rhinos appear only as fleeting shadows. The Asian golden cat emerges through a pair of luminous eyes in the darkness. Elephants are traced through stories of migration and survival shaped by war, economic pressures, and the shifting relationships between elephants and their human caretakers. A kingfisher appears as a fragile reconstruction in paper, echoing the memory of a taxidermied body reanimated through the act of making.        

The Mekong River appears not as a natural landscape but as a line that later became a national border. Its waters move with force through territories marked by militarised histories, where landmines remain buried along riverbanks and animals have been killed after stepping on them. Filmed before a major flood that occurred months after the work was completed, the river also reflects shifting environmental cycles that continue to reshape the region.        

Interwoven with Lanna oral histories, Joysor folk songs, and traditional music from northern Thailand, the installation forms a counter-archive that challenges official narratives of stability, security, and development. These vernacular voices carry memories of ecological loss and displacement that rarely appear within state histories.        

Rather than presenting disappearance as a completed event, the work approaches it as an ongoing condition. Absence, shadow, and diminished presence mark landscapes where political and economic systems continue to reorganise life.