The #IkusezinaIkusten conference is a space for training, debate and experimentation organised by the research group "Kontu Laborategia. Contar en la investigación de frontera" of the University of the Basque Country (UPV) and the ARES project of the University of Deusto, together with Medialab Tabakalera, to learn about experiences around maps with the central theme of the current forms of disappearance.
How do we count and record things, people, and facts about which we barely know anything? What record can be produced for those situations —and those who inhabit them— for which there are no data? What has escaped from the available maps? An old name is employed to name many of these phenomena: disappearance. Starting with the old disappearances – the forced ones—, this term has expanded to include those of migrants who cross deserts or seas and get lost in the open or fall into an unreachable bottom; those of dead women who vanish from their ordinary life; those of the inhabitants of the margins of cities in America, Asia, Africa, Europe. People you do not see. Are these missing people invisible? Or is it that the inherited ways of representing them have been exhausted? These new disappearances force us to radically rethink the strategies with which we map them: How many people disappear in the world? How many conflicts do not appear in the news? What leaves traces and and shows itself, and what does not
The meeting is a continuation of the work carried out by the University of the Basque Country (UPV), the ARES programme of the University of Deusto and Medialab Tabakalera through the Data Commons Lab group, which works on participation, open government and open data in institutional, professional and citizen contexts.
