Speaker: Prof. Dr. Jan Simon Hutta (University of Hamburg)
In Western modernity, the production of space is most often associated with practices of mapping and visualization—from Scott’s *Seeing Like a State* and Foucault’s panopticism to Cosgrove and Rose’s critiques of the “Apollonian gaze” and the “white, heterosexual, masculine gaze” in geography. To date, only sporadic research has examined the role that forms of rendering invisible and disappearance play in spatial governance. This lecture argues that disappearance takes on new significance in the context of planetary crises—both as a technique of governance and as an effect of unequal development and ecological damage. Drawing on ethnographic research in the peri-urban hinterland of Rio de Janeiro, the presentation demonstrates how the violent disappearance of people intersects with state practices of “unmapping” (A. Roy) as well as (infra)structural conditions of “opacity” (M. Santos) and obscurity (A. Mbembe). An intertwining of strategic and structural dynamics of disappearance is also increasingly observable in the North Atlantic and paves the way for new forms of necropolitics.