Apareciendo / Appearing
Gabriel Orge
Apareciendo is a visual intervention project born from a vital and political need: to make visible the faces of people who have disappeared or been murdered in contexts of structural violence throughout Latin America. Through large-scale photographic projections on walls, facades and landscapes, I use the image as a means of disruption, active memory and resistance.
The origins of the project are deeply linked to my personal history. Members of my family were victims of state terrorism and were forced into exile during the military dictatorships in Argentina, Chile, Uruguay and Paraguay. I grew up with the echoes of that pain and the silences that spoke louder than words. I also grew up with the certainty that what had been erased from the public space needed to reappear. This silencing forced me to use projection as a means of restitution: a fleeting but insistent beam of light that penetrates the everyday landscape, raising questions, challenging apathy and invoking collective memory.
Over time, Apareciendo has expanded to encompass other forms of disappearance that persist today, such as femicides and gender-based violence, which continue to erase the bodies of women and sexual dissidents, and the forced displacement and ongoing genocide of indigenous peoples, whose histories are resisted and remembered from the margins of official discourse. They are all expressions of the same systems of exclusion and erasure.
The images I project, from family albums, human rights organizations, feminist movements and indigenous communities, become visible in significant places, neighborhoods where the victims lived, former clandestine detention centers and public spaces marked by violence or abandonment. Each projection is ephemeral, but its sudden appearance breaks the surface of normality. The light does not merely reveal a face, but signals an absence, denounces a crime and calls for remembrance.
Appearing is not only an act of homage, but also a political affirmation. Disappearance is not a phenomenon of the past; it persists under new forms. In this sense, projection becomes an act of resistance; a means of making visible what was intended to be erased and of activating memory in the present and in shared spaces.
This project is an ethical imperative as well as an artistic endeavor, to find a way to give voice to the silenced. The disappeared are not absent. They are present in the light, in the streets and in the images that insist on remembering.

Appearing Calama prisoners

Projection in the Atacama Desert of the executed prisoners of Calama, shot in 1973 during the Caravan of Death, by order of the Pinochet dictatorship. Their families searched for them for over thirty years. Chile, 2017.

Appearing to López in the Ctalamochita River

Projection on the ravine. Jorge Julio López, bricklayer and witness of trials against humanity, disappeared for the second time in democracy. His absence persists as an open wound. Bell Ville, Argentina, 2014.

Appearing Rafaella Filipazzi and Miguel Ángel Soler

Their portraits were projected in downtown Asunción after the identification of their remains, 38 years after they disappeared under the Stroessner dictatorship. Asunción, Paraguay, 2016.

Appearing to the Comechingones

Projection in Ongamira, where in 1574 the original people, cornered by the Spaniards, chose mass suicide on Charalqueta Hill—today Colchiquí, “Hill of Sadness.” Indigenous memory. Punilla Valley, Argentina, 2024.

Appearing José Akselrad

Projection at Refugio Libertad, former Artillery Group 41, a clandestine detention center during the last dictatorship. He was seen there before his forced disappearance. Paravachasca Valley, Argentina, 2024.

Appearing a young M’bya Guaraní

Projection on a tree in the mountain forest, in the territory traditionally inhabited by this indigenous community. A tribute to their ancestral roots and ongoing presence. Salta, Argentina, 2016.

Appearing to the native communities in their ancestral territories

Ephemeral projection in landscape as a gesture of memory, recognition and resistance of the native peoples against the oblivion and appropriation of their lands. Traslasierra Valley, Argentina, 2025.

Self-portrait portraying the condemned

Projection on the walls of the former Miguelete Prison, where they were portrayed before being executed in 1871. My shadow occupies the place of the 19th century photographer in a gesture of visual reparation. Montevideo, Uruguay 2018.

Appearing Cassandre in the Yungas jungle

Projection in the area where her body was found. In memory of the French researcher, victim of femicide. She disappeared and was found in Quebrada de San Lorenzo, near Salta. Argentina, 2017.

Appearing Ester Felipe

On the anniversary of the coup d’état. Her face, projected on a billboard, recalls her kidnapping in 1978 alongside Luis Mónaco. Both remain missing. Córdoba–Buenos Aires Highway, Villa María, 2023.