Making the Disappeared Appear (2023) by Wantanee Siripattananuntakul

Making the Disappeared Appear examines how war, border regimes, and state-led development systematically reorganise life in northern Thailand, producing long-term ecological destruction and multispecies displacement. The work argues that disappearance is not an accidental outcome of modernisation, but a political strategy produced through territorial control, militarisation, and extractive economic systems.        

The five-channel installation follows rhinos, elephants, kingfishers, Asian golden cats, and life along the Mekong River Basin, tracing how conflict, infrastructure projects, and cross-border development schemes have progressively fragmented their habitats. Their diminishing presence reveals how both human and nonhuman lives are governed through overlapping regimes of surveillance, displacement, and resource management.        

Interweaving Lanna oral histories, Joysor folk songs from northern Thailand, and traditional music, the work constructs a counter-archive that challenges official narratives of stability, security, and development. These vernacular forms preserve suppressed knowledge about how extinction, migration, and environmental damage are administered through policy decisions, military operations, and state-led planning.        

Making the Disappeared Appear exposes how disappearance is produced, maintained, and normalised through institutional power. Violence operates not only through visible conflict, but through bureaucratic systems, infrastructure, and economic rationality.        

By foregrounding multispecies vulnerability and survival, the installation reframes ecological crisis as a political condition rather than a technical problem. It situates environmental collapse, forced migration, and extinction within ongoing struggles over land, borders, and historical accountability, extending responsibility to regional and global structures of power.