Absent Presence is a digital project that explores imaginings of and relations across difference in Karachi, Nairobi and Palermo. It emerges from our joint intellectual and artistic reflections on encounters of difference in these three cities.
Through images, sounds, narratives, and archival research, we explore the traces of past and present ‘others’, as well as imaginings of and relations across difference. We also consider the longing, aspirations, and experiences of both those who live with invisibility in the city and those whose modes of coexistence are rapidly being transformed.
Co-produced with interlocutors, artists, architects, sound and mapping specialists and a web developer, the project reflects both our creative impulse and our commitment to expanding the ethnographic imagination. Collaborative practice lies at the heart of this project. Participants have been active in designing and carrying out the research, as well as informing the artistic process and subsequent artistic representations. Artists, researchers, and photographers have embedded their own encounters in the city within their works. Through the site, viewers are invited to navigate the absent presence in Karachi, Nairobi, and Palermo.
The project is part of our broader work on religious difference, funded by the ERC grant Multi-Religious Encounters in Urban Settings (2019-2025). MEUS is a collaborative ethnographic project that focuses on how people live with and across difference in three non-liberal settings (Karachi, Nairobi and Palermo). We study forms, modes, and textures of living with difference in such contexts with the aim of unsettling the universalizing claims of liberal tolerance.
Absent Presence
