Disappearances is an experimental video-poetry project that brings together poetry, sound, music, and visual elements to explore memory, oblivion, and death. Disappearance is approached not as an isolated event, but as a process in which oblivion is actively produced and sustained by social structures.
The body plays a central role in the work, foregrounding the idea that memory can exist only as long as it is carried and maintained by a community. In this sense, the project reflects on identity as a product of collective memory rather than a fixed or individual condition.
The work engages with emotional tension and painful registers, emphasising the necessity of confronting trauma, history, and both personal and collective pasts in order to reconfigure identity. Vocal techniques drawn from extreme music practices, specifically vocal fry, are used to amplify inner processes, making internal states audible. These sonic interventions function simultaneously as expressions of release and as mechanisms of healing.
The project is part of the subthemes Writing After – Catastrophe, Memory, and the Archive of Loss, Unruly Forms – Experiments in the Poetic Wild.
Author
Adriana Hurjui
Adriana Hurjui was born in 1986 in Piatra-Neamț, Romania. She studied Sociology at Transilvania University in Brașov, where she also completed an MA in Sociology – Human Resources. Her academic work enabled the publication of a paper in Gestiunea și dezvoltarea resursei umane. Aplicații practice (Presa Universitară Clujeană, 2014). She currently lives and works in Brașov.
With over ten years of experience in the Human Resources field and the NGO sector, she is one of the founders of the Visum Association for Education and Culture, an organisation engaged in education, culture, independent journalism, and urban mobility initiatives. She writes for the Litera9 project, addressing contemporary issues through a sociological perspective.
Alongside her sociological work, she develops an autodidactic artistic practice in drawing and painting, often informed by surrealist approaches. Her work is grounded in interdisciplinarity, bringing together sociological analysis and creative expression. Through this intersection, she seeks to encourage dialogue and critical reflection on how knowledge and art shape the understanding of society.
