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“…This is why I have gradually come to think of my work within the purview of four labours: the labour of mourning in the presence of the corpse, the labour of the ruin, the labour of seeing by way of death and the labour of missing. It is in thinking this latter that I’ve come to propose that those who wait for the disappeared must begin to transform their waiting – a wasting away – into a labour of missing through which the disappeared are objectified within an unquiet absence that is made to cohabit the conversation of the over-livers, namely those continue to live the time of a protracted civil war.  The labour of missing is an attempt to theorize what the over-livers must do in order to maintain the forcibly disappeared present, even if absent. Their labour inters the disappeared in this protracted now.  I, therefore, do not approach absence as an interregnum between a disappearance and reappearance.”

 From a conversation with Jacko Restikian (2011)