Absent Bodies, Suspended Memories

Abstract

This article investigates how the tension between presence and absence reveals the role of images in the production of space and memory, and in the administration of the sensible, at the Morro Velho mine in Nova Lima (Minas Gerais, Brazil). Drawing on a photograph of a former changing room, it analyses how visual framings, captions, and curatorial choices produce regimes of visibility that naturalise the erasure of the bodies that sustained extractive activity grounded in colonial and capitalist logics. Mobilising Benjamin, Butler, Azoulay, Lefebvre, Federici, and Graeber, the text proposes “thinking through images” to show how the scene — saturated with objects and emptied of workers — operates a politics of absence, in which both productive labour and the reproductive labour that sustains it are removed from the field of appearance. The changing room emerges as a liminal space whose material traces function as phantasmagorias and agents of memory, enabling the formulation of questions that disrupt the museological framing and reopen the history of mining through a critical lens. By treating the image as a complex artefact, the article demonstrates how official narratives silence lives that were essential to the local economy while also indicating that these lives resist and insist on reappearing as traces and possibilities. Excavating these images becomes a political gesture of historical reinscription that challenges documentary neutrality, reactivating erased tensions, and proposing other ways of seeing and recognising the lives that sustained both productive and reproductive labour, yet remain invisibilised within institutional memory.