From private grief to public memory: Visual and participatory practices of resistance across the Mediterranean

In June 2025, families of people who died or disappeared at Europe’s maritime borders collaborated with activists, researchers and artist Séverine Sajous to create a public mural in Palermo (Italy). Emerging from a broader transnational process of memory work, advocacy and participatory research, promoted by the NGO Mem.Med, the mural transformed photographs, personal messages and testimonies into a collective visual intervention addressing the ongoing consequences of border violence. This article examines both the mural and the collaborative process through which it was created. Drawing on participatory and arts-based methods, we analyse how relatives of the dead and disappeared actively contributed to the selection, curation and public circulation of visual and textual materials. Rather than treating the mural and its making as a simple commemorative event, we approach it as a form of knowledge production through which private experiences of loss are transformed into public claims for recognition, truth and justice. We argue that the mural functions simultaneously as a counter-archive, a counter-memorial and a reparative practice from below. By making visible lives frequently erased by contemporary border regimes, it challenges institutional forms of forgetting and reaffirms the dignity of those rendered absent in official accounts. The article shows how participatory artistic practices can generate public memory through relationships of care, solidarity and collective action, while contributing to a sociology of dignity centred on recognition, agency and resistance. In doing so, it highlights the potential of collaborative visual interventions to connect research, activism and lived experience in the pursuit of more just forms of social and political belonging.