The Topic

This conversation will explore what role the arts can play when faced with the extreme violence of enforced disappearance. Drawing upon the participants’ experiences and research, it will speak about the importance of witnessing and the way art allows for a different kind of political conversation on a form of violence that creates a spectacle of absence.

The Agenda

We invite you to join our live streamed Edgy Ideas Podcast where Dr Simon Western will host Brad and Chantal. We will then follow a webinar format, enabling you to share your thoughts and reflections in small groups before joining our weaving plenary with Chantal and Brad to share thoughts and ask questions. This should be a very special webinar – please join us!

The Speakers

Chantal Meza, Mexico 1989. Abstract painter living and working in the United Kingdom. Her work has featured in exhibitions, auctions and biennials in prominent Museums and Galleries in Mexico, United Kingdom, Paraguay and Germany. She has delivered international lectures and workshops at reputable universities such as Harvard University, École Normale Superiéure, Goethe Univeristät, Goldsmiths University among others, as well as being commissioned publicly and privately. Her work has received the support of grants, public recognitions and awards of prominent institutions in the cultural sector. More recently, her first edited volume “State of Disappearance” was published by McGill Queens University Press. 

Professor Brad Evans. Political philosopher, critical theorist, and writer, who specializes on the problem of violence. He is author of over 20 books and edited volumes, including most recently State of Disappearance (with Chantal Meza, McGill Queens University Press: 2023) & Ecce Humanitas: Beholding the Pain of Humanity (Columbia University Press, 2020). He previously led a dedicated columns/series on violence in both the New York Times and the Los Angeles Review of Books. Brad currently serves as Chair of Political Violence and Aesthetics at the University of Bath, United Kingdom, where is he founder and director of the Centre for the Study of Violence. His latest book How Black Was My Valley: Poverty and Abandonment in a Post-Industrial Heartland will soon be published by Repeater/Penguin Random House in April 2024.