The artist and writer Walid Sadek has been demanding we ‘labour the missing’ in his prose and artistic practice, confronting the regnant ideology of our contemporary -- melancholia, nostalgia -- through a careful critique of waiting for those who disappeared during Lebanon’s protracted civil war to return before politics can get started again. Sadek perceives the present as always-already holed, rendering the contemporary longing for a future (saved or damned, full or empty) meaningless. He proposes a way to create in and around a gaping, holed, lacking reality.