WIPSS - Living Each Other’s Death - Where do the dead go?

Event: WIPSS - Living Each Other’s Death - Where do the dead go?

Date: Thursday 26 March 2026

Time: 17:00-19:00

Venue: Faculty of Arts Library, 2nd Floor, Old Humanities Building, University of Malta

This talk explores how people in contemporary Malta find ways to keep the dead active in everyday life. Drawing on a work-in-progress ethnographic film project composed of intimate mourning portraits, Camilleri approaches grief not as a psychological interiority, but as a material and relational practice. The dead do not simply persist as memories; they linger as forces that move through objects, gestures, routines, and silences. Clothes cannot be discarded, plants are
tended, names are spoken repeatedly. These practices do not symbolise loss; they keep relationships going.

Set against these intimate portraits is a different problem: how are the unnamed remembered? In the context of migrant deaths at sea, lives are absorbed into procedures, numbers, and files. Bodies fragment, names dissolve, and commemoration circulates without anchoring itself to kinship or ancestry. What remains are residues, ceremonies without graves, forms of remembrance that hover without settling. Here, death is present but uncontainable, active yet administratively displaced.

The talk draws on contemporary discussions of animism to rethink fetishism not as illusion or error, but as a practical response to loss. When social bonds are strained or interrupted, relations are displaced onto things. Objects become sites of animation, obligation, and care. In domestic mourning, these objects function as forms of contemporary ancestor worship: not revered icons, but demanding presences that structure time, attention, and responsibility.

Elsewhere, fetishism hardens into abstraction, producing a colder economy of death in which lives circulate without intimacy or return. Film functions here not as documentation, but as a way of thinking with animacy. By slowing time, magnifying touch, and allowing objects to act, it makes visible the uneasy traffic between the living and the dead. The talk argues that mourning today unfolds through a tension between abstraction and animation, between deaths that are managed and deaths that insist on being lived with. To ask where the dead go, this work suggests, is also to ask how the living make room for what refuses to disappear.

Adrian Carl Camilleri is an anthropologist and filmmaker completing a PhD at the University of Malta. His work explores death, mourning, and remembrance in contemporary Malta through ethnographic film and writing. Drawing inspiration from material culture, contemporary animism, and the anthropology of magic, his research examines how the dead remain active through objects, rituals, and everyday practices, while also engaging with situations in which death becomes unnamed, bureaucratised, or displaced. His approach treats film not as documentation but as a way of thinking with matter, presence, and the uneasy afterlife of things.