The Spirits of Tasi Tolu: the role of the dead on a contested site

Drawing on practice-led research and the production of the 2025 documentary film The Spirits of Tasi Tolu , this article analyses the tensions surrounding Tasi Tolu, a wetland area in Timor-Leste that was used as a site of extrajudicial executions and secret burials during the Indonesian occupation (1975–99). It examines multiple, overlapping conceptions of the landscape: as a forensic terrain where investigators search for physical evidence; as a spiritual landscape inhabited by the dead; as a Catholic commemorative site; and as an area targeted for commercial development and state-led economic transformation. The research demonstrates how customary, traditional/Catholic and modern/secular ontological frameworks coexist in shaping the remembrance of victims of the occupation. In the case of Tasi Tolu, the local community has reinscribed meaning onto a landscape threatened with erasure, transforming it from a ‘haunted’ place into a living site of memory and cultural practice. Ultimately, the article argues that acknowledging the role of the dead is essential to understanding contemporary social life in Timor-Leste and to recognising the challenges that neoliberal state-building projects encounter in landscapes marked by political violence.