My work re-enacted the walking protests of the Madres de Plaza de Mayo (Mothers of the May Square) in Argentina as a durational performance lasting twelve hours. The performance highlighted the relationship between the protests in Argentina and my own experiences as second-generation migrant in Australia. Specifically, this relationship describes the protests that recognise the 30,000 Argentinians that were “disappeared” by the 1976–1983 military government alongside the process of colonization that “disappears” cultural difference in Australia.

This work acknowledges the continuation of disappearance that is imprinted in the body—from my loss of language, to the Anglicisation of my name, to the stories of disappearance my father told so often that they became my own memories.

It is a work about displacement—felt within my home country, within my own body; about the disruption to place and time that disappearance creates; and about the complicated relationship I have with the inherited nationality of a country I do not know, and memories of a time that are not mine. It is work that attempts to unpack a deeply felt absence and a yearning.

So I walk in remembrance. So I walk in protest. So I walk to inscribe.

This work was performed from sunrise to sunset on a Thursday, the day on which the Madres still gather to protest every week.