The Weight of Absence

This is our attempt to make sense of something vast. After navigating this topic for months, we realised that censorship has no single definition, no fixed boundaries, and no clear edges. It moves across spectrums and intentions, operates through entirely different logics depending on who exercises it and why—and produces, in all of these cases, its own distinct visualities. This publication is only a small window into that extensive world: a curated selection of material, shaped by what we found, what we could access, and what felt most urgent to us.

The book is structured around seven censorship markers and mechanisms, moving conceptually from the most explicit and material forms to the most invisible and opaque. That sequence is intentional, but it is not a condition. Each chapter stands on its own—the book can be entered from anywhere, navigated in any direction, read at whatever depth feels right.

Censorship begins with a perception: that something is too dangerous, too problematic, too sensitive—too powerful—to be allowed to remain. An image, a text, an object, a story, an opinion, a voice, an individual: they all have the power to challenge the coherence of a group’s identity, the aesthetic and ideological boundaries through which any community, institution, or regime defines and holds itself together.[1] When something crosses that boundary, the response follows—destroy it, disfigure it, conceal it. This logic runs through every form of censorship, however subtle: what cannot be controlled must be removed, and what cannot be removed must at least be made unseen.

Von Falkenhausen, ‘What to Do with the Power of Images?’, p. 12.