The Platform and its Ribbons
In February 2024, Rosa finished a conversation with La Guardiana del Bosque, a WhatsApp chatbot. Rosa, as well as thousands of searching families (colectivos de buscadoras) across Mexico, is looking for her disappeared tesoro (“treasure”—the name used for a disappeared loved one) and trying to build memory in a context of extreme impunity. The chatbot is part of El Bosque de la Esperanza, a dispersed, self-managed, modular gathering of physical and virtual memory spaces built by over a hundred families across six Mexican cities since 2022. The project emerged from a practice developed by families themselves to reclaim sites of memory in public space: Árboles de la Esperanza (“Trees of Hope”), where ribbons hang from the branches of public trees, each inscribed with the name of a tesoro.1 Every ribbon carries a laser-etched portrait and a QR code linking to a webpage that its family composes, curates, and controls. As such, the memorial exists twice, above and below ground: once as ribbons in trees, and once in the digital network beneath them.
Rosa sent a link to La Guardiana del Bosque to have it uploaded to her tesoro’s webpage. It opened onto the virtual ribbon of her son Juan Eduardo, who disappeared in Guanajuato in 2018. Besides the administrative facts of his case, Rosa has added a grainy photograph of his favorite meal: sopa Maruchan con galletas saladas y salsa (instant ramen, salted crackers, and hot sauce). This is common among many of the families that are part of El Bosque de la Esperanza: the smallest unit of its archive is not a record, but a dish somebody remembers their loved one enjoyed. Everything that follows from this is a question about what infrastructure allows their memory to survive.
Like a vast mycelial network operating beneath the visible forest canopy, the truth of the missing thrives in the shadows and is sustained by connections the surface gaze refuses to acknowledge. For the families of the disappeared, the struggle over visibility is inseparable from a struggle over survival. Across Mexico, search collectives—many led by mothers, daughters, spouses, and sisters—have transformed mourning into a form of forensic and political labor. Equipped with shovels, a sun hat, flip flops, mobile phones, and collectively accumulated knowledge, they search deserts, fields, forests, vacant lots, and abandoned properties. They maintain databases, organize investigations, identify patterns of violence, and frequently uncover mass graves and evidence before state authorities do. In many respects, they have become counter-institutions of truth production.
Those who maintain these infrastructures of memory and evidence have increasingly become targets themselves. In recent years, organized crime, state collusion, and impunity have subjected searching mothers and activists to threats, harassment, violence, and assassination.2 Their targeting reveals that disappearance is not a singular event but an ongoing political process. Bodies disappear, evidence disappears, records disappear, and, at times, those attempting to remember are also made to disappear. Violence extends beyond the absent person to encompass the social infrastructures through which absence becomes publicly legible. How, then, does one design for mourning when the conditions of remembrance are themselves under attack? How does one create spaces of memory when evidence can be erased, archives manipulated, memorials removed, and mourners threatened?
Conventional monuments offer an inadequate response to this problem. Monumental architecture has historically relied upon permanence as a guarantee of remembrance. Stone, bronze, fixed sites, and durable forms are meant to resist time, securing memory against forgetting.3 Yet, in landscapes shaped by impunity, permanence can become a vulnerability. A monument can be fenced off, dispossessed, vandalized, neglected, or destroyed. It can become a target precisely because it is fixed in place and easy to identify. Under such conditions, memory cannot rely solely on visibility, durability, or institutional recognition. The problem, then, is not simply how to commemorate the disappeared, but how to cultivate forms of memory capable of surviving erasure. The challenge is not only how to make memory visible, but how to make it resist.
In toxic political soil, memory can learn from the forest. Not from the tree that stands alone on the horizon, visible and exposed, but from the dense networks beneath it: diffuse, adaptive, and difficult to eradicate. Beneath the forest floor, fungal mycelia connect disparate organisms through vast subterranean webs of exchange, communication, and support. They persist not because they are monumental, but because they are dispersed. If one node is destroyed, others remain. If a pathway is severed, new pathways emerge.4 Such a model suggests a different way of designing and thinking about remembrance under conditions of disappearance. Rather than a singular monument anchored to a fixed site, memory becomes a distributed infrastructure of relations. Rather than relying on visibility, institutional recognition, or physical permanence, it survives through connection, redundancy, and regeneration. It spreads across locations, bodies, stories, digital traces, and practices of care. What endures is not the object itself, but the capacity of the network to reactivate itself despite neglect or attack.
This dispersed, regenerative form of remembrance can be described as “mycelial memory.” It exists in the subterranean, a realm where the logic of surface and visibility is rendered obsolete. Like mycelium spanning limitless surfaces concealed, these collectives have connected isolated struggles across the country by operating in the shadows. They exchange information and emotional sustenance through informal channels (such as Facebook, WhatsApp groups, and other digital platforms) that mirror the fungal exchange of energy, creating networks of care that persist despite systemic violence. Yet these networks are not necessarily harmonious; internal conflict and competition emerge as state-imposed scarcity limits access to forensic resources, recognition, and funding. Like hyphae competing for resources within the same soil, collectives navigate a landscape where solidarity is fractured by structural neglect.
Within this conceptual terrain, El Bosque de la Esperanza is an experiment in mnemonic infrastructure. Developed alongside families searching for disappeared loved ones across Mexico, it does not seek to construct another monument to loss. Instead, it asks how memory might survive conditions of systematic erasure by becoming distributed, networked, and alive. If disappearance functions by isolating bodies, silencing witnesses, and fragmenting social bonds, remembrance may require the opposite movement: a proliferation of connections capable of exceeding any single site, archive, or institution. This architecture of memory relies less on the permanence of stone than on the resistance in connection and trust. Like mycelium, memory survives not by standing still, but by remaining intricately woven beneath the surface, adapting and regrowing even when the visible realm is under attack.
El Bosque de la Esperanza’s Mycelial Memory
For family collectives’ searches for disappeared tesoros, the subterranean is both a literal excavation site and a metaphorical space of oblivion where mothers, daughters, spouses and sisters dig into the earth to find mass graves and physical remains of their loved ones. It is tempting to read the digital half of the Bosque de la Esperanza as an inverted subterranean; a web suspended above our heads rather than woven beneath our feet. However, what makes the subsoil hospitable to mycelia (and its memory) is precisely what a web platform, left to its defaults, undoes: depth resists indexing; dispersal resists seizure; darkness resists extractive gazes. A web or data server centralizes, logs, can be subpoenaed, and belongs to somebody. The families who have built this archive are already familiar with this, for the ongoing crisis of the disappeared in Mexico is administered politically through dispersed databases. For instance, the 2023 federal and legal census compressed more than 130,000 recognized records of disappeared persons into 12,377. When collectives say the disappeared are being disappeared again, they are describing these kinds of operations, ones performed on records rather than on bodies.
The idea for the digital half of the Bosque de la Esperanza was not just to build an archive, but a form of documentation that could not be used against searching families, as Mexican governments often do when they use data, reports, and case files to dismiss their obligations to search for and identify the disappeared. It comprises two political technologies: a public platform, where searching kin author their own memorial pages, and La Guardiana, a text-based interface of an infrastructure they already inhabit (WhatsApp).5 The content of all memorial pages and its metadata belong to the families: a data release contract forbids El Bosque from selling or sharing data with third parties, and allows families to remove their data whenever they please, no questions asked. This is because the families are not users of the platform but co-researchers in it: the archive is a by-product of their own investigation into where their tesoros are located.6 However, La Guardiana runs on Meta's servers, under terms of service no community of searching mothers will ever be in a position to negotiate. Subterranity in these conditions is not an inherent property of the project, but an aspiration under permanent construction, where every decision can be reversed by a migration, an acquisition, or a policy update written in another country.
Above ground, the network surfaces as ribbons with elements silkscreened on retroreflective cloth—a material that returns light along the axis from which it arrived. As a result, aerial surveys or satellite passes cannot find them, yet a mother with a flashlight can, the ribbons flickering in the dark, refusing to allow total darkness to descend.7 “Weak signals” at the threshold of detectability are not amplified here into spectacle; they are multiplied timidly, which is a different and more difficult operation for the state to capture.8 And when the families of Colectivo Solecito from the State of Veracruz read a public statement at the foot of their tree in the main plaza of their port city, the tree becomes a forum, if only briefly. The colonial architectures of the square, so accustomed to the quotidian chatter of street vendors and tourists are interrupted by the bodies, voices, and stories of women who perform their love for their tesoros, despite continued efforts by both state and criminal forces to screen them off the public gaze. Their Árbol de la Esperanza, a towering Indian Ficus, provides shade and stage, and the ribbons shimmer as they name, one by one, the child, parent, friend, spouse, or sibling they search for.
By the end of 2023, nearly thirty cities in Mexico had, or once had, an Árbol de la Esperanza. Several were lost to violent removal by criminals, state agents, or their collusion. Security personnel tore missing-persons pamphlets and posters and covered their faces with tarps. The Glorieta de las y los desaparecidos—a roundabout renamed by searching families in the center of Mexico City—has had its posters of the disappeared painted over more than once. The fragility of these objects is not a material property of cloth or paper, but a political product, manufactured deliberately to confine memory to privately held grief. The forest does not regrow on its own, but only because collectives continuously replant it. Resistance is not an inherent topology to El Bosque de la Esperanza, but a mnemonic labor it redistributes among searching families as well as non-affected audiences, who through encountering, witnessing, and circulating the traces of those who are missing, are invited to support and sustain memories that might otherwise remain invisible.
This mycelial kind of dispersal may help protect, but it does not fully safeguard. QR codes fade, web hosting depends on third parties, and digitization is itself a vector of extraction. The appropriation of memory by governments, universities, artists, and private actors is a constant threat. The archive’s power is never separable from the power of whoever holds the building.9 Designing for the affected has a long record of designing them away.10 Yet El Bosque de la Esperanza is not a memorial but a protocol. As communities of the disappeared author, control, and reactivate their own mnemonic records—against both state erasure and corporate extraction, against the speed of platforms—they gain a form of epistemic sovereignty.
Mycelial (im)Permanence
El Bosque de la Esperanza begins from the instability of recognition. Its ribbons can be removed, its trees cut down, its posters covered. Silkscreens fade, platforms disappear, and servers change hands. Dispersal does not make memory indestructible, nor does the digital liberate remembrance from the vulnerabilities of the physical world. No medium of memory exists outside vulnerability. What changes is where resistance can take root: no longer only in a fixed, visible site, but across a dispersed network of physical and digital traces, held and sustained by families themselves.
If the conventional monument gambles on the endurance of an object, mycelial memory wagers on the capacity of a relation to be renewed. The former seeks permanence through material stability; the latter persists through repetition, translation, redistribution, and care. A ribbon removed from one tree can appear on another. A story can move between a body, a photograph, a WhatsApp message, a webpage, and a public square without belonging completely to any of them. The archive survives not because any single node is permanent, but because memory can travel between nodes.
Here, the underground refuses the surface as the sole site of political reality. The inversion of the gaze does not simply make disappearance visible; it challenges the authority that determines what counts as visible, valuable, and “grievable” in the first place.11 The rhizomatic, meanwhile, offers neither a fantasy of perfect solidarity nor a network immune to violence. It describes a form capable of enduring rupture because no single point can stand for the whole. If one node is destroyed, others remain. If one pathway is severed, another can emerge.
The architecture of El Bosque de la Esperanza therefore lies less in its trees, ribbons, QR codes, or digital platform than in the relations connecting them. Its material is the possibility of reactivation. Each time a family ties another ribbon, tells a story, restores a removed memorial, shares a page, or claims another tree, memory is not simply preserved. It is enacted again. What appears fragile at the level of the object becomes persistent at the level of the network.
The forest offers no fantasy of invulnerability. It survives through loss, adaptation, and continual renewal. El Bosque de la Esperanza similarly proposes not permanence without destruction, but continuity through transformation. This may be what it means to design mourning under conditions of disappearance: not to build something that promises never to vanish, but to cultivate the conditions through which memory returns after it does. In this way, the forest and mycelium do not ask permission to grow. They spread through the cracks of concrete, through roots, soil, and hidden connections. Beneath the spectacle of visibility and beyond the reach of any single monument, memory persists in much the same way. The forest survives not because every tree remains standing, but because beneath, between, and beyond them, something remains capable of growing again.
The FUUNDEC-M collective began this practice with the first Tree of Hope on August 30, 2015, in Torreón, Coahuila.
Erika Rosete, “Asesinan en Guanajuato a la buscadora Patricia Negrete Tafoya en un ataque directo,” El País, June 25, 2026, ➝.
Andreas Huyssen, Present Pasts: Urban Palimpsests and the Politics of Memory (Stanford University Press, 2003).
Mark D. Fricker et al., “Mycelial Networks: Structure and Dynamics,” in Ecology of Saprotrophic Basidiomycetes, ed. Lynne Boddy et al. (Amsterdam: Elsevier, 2008), 11–14.
Oriana Bernasconi, et al., “Political Technologies of Memory: Uses and Appropriations of Artefacts that Register and Denounce State Violence,” International Journal of Transitional Justice 13, no. 1 (2019): 7–29.
Orlando Fals-Borda, “The Application of Participatory Action-Research in Latin America,” International Sociology 2, no. 4 (1987): 329–47.
Georges Didi-Huberman, Supervivencia de las luciérnagas (Abada editores, 2011).
Eyal Weizman, Forensic Architecture: Violence at the Threshold of Detectability (New York: Zone Books, 2017).
Achille Mbembe, “The Power of the Archive and its Limits,” in Refiguring the Archive, ed. C. Hamilton et al. (Dordrecht: Springer Netherlands, 2002), 19–27.
Eyal Weizman, The Least of All Possible Evils: A Short History of Humanitarian Violence (London: Verso, 2017).
Judith Butler, Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? (London: Verso, 2009).
