Disappearance
Disappearance has followed me for years, long before I had the language for it. It is not absence, not a void, not a vanishing act. It is something quieter. A slipping. A way of moving differently inside structures that want the body to behave, to be readable, to stay still. Phelan writes about performance disappearing (1993), but I have always felt disappearance as something the body does, not something that happens to it.
When I disappear in my work, I am not gone. I am redirecting where presence sits. Sometimes it sits in the wall. Sometimes in the breath. Sometimes in the moment after the gesture, when the room hasn’t caught up yet. Disappearance becomes a tactic when you are too easily categorised, too quickly claimed, too readily folded into the institution’s idea of who you should be. Ahmed’s writing on orientation (2006) helped me understand this: disappearance is a turning away from the expected line, a re‑facing of the world on my own terms.
In the performances where I blend into the gallery wall, or where the action dissolves before anyone can pin it down, I am not retreating. I am shifting the terms of engagement. I am showing how whiteness operates as architecture, as surface, as a demand to be neutral and compliant. Moten’s thinking on fugitivity (2013) sits close to this for me — the idea that refusal is not a collapse but a movement toward something else.
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What remains after disappearance is not emptiness. It is residue, trace, the after‑feeling of something that happened but refuses to be held in the usual ways. Some work wants to be archived. Mine often wants to be sensed. Disappearance is not the loss of the work; it is the method through which the work insists on being encountered differently.
References:
Ahmed, S. (2006) Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others. Durham: Duke University Press.
Moten, F. (2013) In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Phelan, P. (1993) Unmarked: The Politics of Performance. London: Routledge.
