The project reflects on the phenomenon of “missing persons,” referring to individuals who have disappeared either voluntarily or under coercion, leaving no trace behind. Their absence creates a suspended legal and existential condition in which their status—alive or dead—cannot be confirmed. In the absence of unified international regulation, each case is governed by national jurisdiction. While many countries allow a person to be declared legally dead after a defined period (for example seven years), in Italy this threshold extends to ten years before a formal declaration of presumed death can be issued. Such declarations carry the same legal consequences as physical death, affecting both personal identity and property rights, unless evidence later emerges contradicting the assumption.

The project also examines the role of Interpol as the only international organisation maintaining a publicly accessible database dedicated to missing persons. The images included in the work are drawn from this archive, capturing a snapshot of individuals officially registered as missing at a specific moment in time. Statistical data reveals the scale and paradoxes of disappearance: between 1974 and 2013 in Italy alone, over 26,000 people were reported missing, while international records at a given point list only a fraction of ongoing cases. The archive itself is unstable, continuously updated, with entries regularly removed without explanation or public outcome.

On a specific date in 2014, 832 individuals from 90 countries were recorded in the database, including entries without images, replaced by the note “photo not available.” The dataset reveals further disparities in age, gender and geography, exposing patterns of absence structured through bureaucratic classification: men, women, adults and minors distributed unevenly across countries with the highest numbers of reported disappearances.

Beyond its documentary function, the project questions the status of these images and their transformation into signs detached from their subjects. By isolating photographs from their relational context, it interrogates the fragile boundary between visibility and disappearance, as well as the ways institutional imagery constructs meaning through absence, repetition and loss.