[Commlist] Visible Evidence XXVIII

The Visible Evidence XXVII took place in Frankfurt last week and much 
appreciation is due to its organisers Laliv Melamed and Vinzenz Hediger 
and their team. It was a generative and fascinating event. Thank you so 
much!

*Visible Evidence XXVIII will take place at the University of Gdansk 
between 10-14th August 2022.    The conference is conceived as a 
physical meeting and we invite everybody warmly to make every effort to 
attend the sessions in person, although there will be a hybrid option 
too. As this edition of the conference will focus on connections between 
history and documentary film endeavour, it is particularly important 
that the VE scholars and practitioners have an embodied encounter with 
the city. The University is situated in the heart of Gdansk, not far 
from its historic district and beautiful beaches.*

VE XXVIII steering committee is particularly interested in formats that 
draw on previous dialogues, such as pre-constituted panels, workshops 
and conversations (see below) that bring together scholars and 
practitioners.   We will also be interested in philosophical 
underpinning of the documentary film studies. The conference will 
welcome practice research contributions such as video essays, short 
documentary films,  long screenings and mixed medium presentations as 
well as formal papers. The submission guidelines below are but the 
guidelines and we welcome other ideas.  The specially constructed 
website will be announce in early 2922, meanwhile you are welcome to 
direct your queries to me on this email address.

We can confirm that *Professor Elizabeth Cowie* and myself will offer 
one of the keynote plenary sessions, and aim to invite notable Polish 
scholars and filmmakers too for a number of plenary sessions.

Please note that the registration fee for the Faculty member will be*120 
Euros and 40 Euros for the students. However, please note that we be 
giving fee waivers to anybody who needs it so if your proposal is 
accepted, we would like to help you attend.*

*VE XXVII, 2022: Images of History*

The theme for the XXVIII Visible Evidence is the notion of /Images of 
History/.  The conference is taking place in Gdansk which is a city with 
rich history that spans hundreds of years from its commercial past, 
connected to the Hanseatic League, going back to 1356. One could argue 
that the City’s proud traditions of freedom can be traced to its 
traditions of respecting journeys of any kind as a tool for exchanging 
goods, but also ideas and practices.  Gdansk is more than a diverse 
city.  It strives to stand for liberty and open mindedness, the freedoms 
of thought as well as the freedom to be equal in political and economic 
settings.  From being a near imperial power in the heart of Europe for 
some 200 years since the Sixteenth century, Poland disappeared from the 
maps of Europe for some 130 years only to return as a State after the 
First World War.  The Second World War started here in Gdansk and the 
heroic battle of Westerplatte is still remembered and honoured, with 
monuments and museums - and of course documentary films.  Solidarity, 
the Free Trade union led by the pivotal figure of Lech Walesa has a 
crucial role in the overthrowing of the totalitarian Soviet rule.  The 
Gdansk Shipyard was the birthplace of this crucial resistance. The 
memory of it has its symbolic home at the European Solidarity Centre. 
The Centre is both the museum of the movement and the transformations, 
but is also a home for archival collections, documentaries and 
testimonies of those who took part in the struggles and are still here 
to tell their stories. All the participants of the VE will have an 
opportunity to visit the collections and we aim to hold a joint event there.

The Visible Evidence’s theme this year will therefore aim to reflect on 
the connections between history, archive and documentaries in the 
broadest meaning of these categories. We invite scholars from all 
disciplines too to submit proposals so that our meeting would be truly 
transdisciplinary.  Our ambition is to make the event a space that will 
strive to reformulate some of the foundational notions in the 
documentary films studies and practice, relating to archive and the 
production of knowledge, or knowledges (as Donna Haraway would say).   
In the current post pandemic, post-truth age in which we are invited and 
expected to live in a continuous state of insecurity and anxiety, what 
role can a documentary film/factual moving image play in culture and 
society?

The deadline for submission will be 15^th  February 2022 and we will be 
in touch soon with the details of the submission site and the website.

+++

Further Details Visible Evidence XXVII in Gdansk

As part of the Visible Evidence movement of ‘truth seekers,’ do we go 
back to Bill Nichols’ famous statement of 1991 that the documentary 
should be akin to ‘the discourse of sobriety’ that is like science and 
history in its ambitions to focus on facts, and be objective and 
impartial? Or do we take on board more recent thoughts of Michael Renov, 
Elizabeth Cowie, Agnieszka Piotrowska (amongst others) and ascribe to 
the notion that a documentary is a creative and subjective moving image 
text which is more an expression of our unconscious desires rather than 
facts?  Whilst Nichols himself has tried repeatedly to distance himself 
from his highly influential phrase, one could argue provocatively that, 
in this day and age, we do want documentary film to be objective and 
rely on facts more than emotions.  But then, in this context, how do we 
consider autobiographical documentary texts or the works which combine 
factual footage with fiction and animation?   These are just a few of 
the questions this conference seeks to explore.

In documentary scholarship and practice, it is hard to imagine a 
historical documentary without archive. Jacques Derrida in his /Archive 
Fever/ (1985) points out that the concept of the archive is complicated 
and contradictory, holding onto memory but also in some ways trying to 
forget certain aspects of it.  What do we forget and why?  Who tells the 
story and how can a dominant narrative be subverted and why is it 
crucial to do so? And finally, is it possible at all to be a documentary 
filmmaker or a documentary film scholar and remain somehow neutral or is 
it our /ethical/ obligation to be political in everything we do.   The 
great Polish literary scholar, the late Professor Maria Janion, demanded 
that the voices subdued and repressed by the dominant ruling culture be 
unearthed by the academics so that those silenced for whatever reason 
can be heard again.

We would like to explore these ideas through a dialogue between theory 
and practice. We invite scholars, filmmakers, archivists and activists 
to propose panels and presentations that address any aspect of 
documentary and non-fiction media.

*Special threads and themes may include (but are in no way limited to):*

*Documentary and Archive: *how is archive being used in documentary and 
drama or mock documentary? We can explore the role of home movies in 
creating documentaries and how some filmmakers (for example Sarah 
Polley), have introduced a combination of areal archive and fake archive 
without informing the viewer. What are the ethics of using archive as 
‘found footage’?

*Documentary, Fiction, Animation : *the methods and concepts from the 
ethics some of the works which deploy drama next to archival footage and 
interviews in order to tell stories which are ‘unrepresentable’

*Documentary and Conflict*: we continue the theme from Frankfurt: How 
should we perceive conflict not just as a historically specific 
geopolitical crisis, but as an interaction of aesthetic forces that 
reorders documentary temporalities, geographies and speech-acts? What 
role is taken by documentary in an age of rising fascism, post- and 
neo-colonialism, transnational military interventions and global 
humanitarianism?

*Documentary and social media*: The advent of new media platforms and 
technologies bears, on the one hand, potential for a radical 
reorganization of social bodies. On the other hand, they also create 
fraught contexts through which the social is organized by corporate 
logic and pseudo-democratic regimes. Framed within these social and 
medial settings, what forms of deliberation documentary brings to 
contemporary public and counter-public spheres?

*Race, Gender and Sexuality: *How can documentary serve as a means of 
transgression, a tool for community building, or a platform for 
organization/organizing in a political climate marked by exclusionary 
tribalisms? How can documentary resurrect non-hegemonic pasts and 
presents and open up spaces outside of a white, heteronormative and 
patriarchal matrix?

*Documentary and the autobiographical mode*: Why is the essay film mode 
(drawing from Corrington, Daniels, Elsaesser, Lebow, Marker and 
Montesquieu) important? How can a personal history contribute to the 
knowledge of ‘History’?

*Documentary Pedagogy:* How can we think of documentary pedagogy through 
a vernacular prism? How have documentary studies responded to the 
shifting labour conditions of teaching at individual, departmental, and 
disciplinary levels?  How have they been reshaped by videographic 
practices of criticism and scholarship? How do the evolving 
methodologies of teaching and writing about documentary speak to the 
labour it asks of us?

*Documentary and the Politics of Information:* The current crisis 
evolving from the Coronavirus pandemic brought to the surface many 
questions related to information, its representation, circulation and 
use as a means of governance, surveillance or trust. These questions go 
back to core assumptions of documentary. How does (and whether) the 
gesture of informing the public contribute to the forming of responsible 
and responsive citizenry? How do forms of visualization cater to 
different relations to authority, or different modes of address?

*Guidelines for Submission:*

*Panel proposal:*

Panels will consist of three presentations of no more than 15 
minutes for each presentation with a ten-minute response from the 
panellists’ chosen respondent. Panel proposals require a title, a 
300-word description of the panel itself, five keywords that identify 
the panel’s focus, a 250-word abstract for each paper, or for filmmakers 
200 words abstract and 20 minutes worth of  materials (via link), a 
100-word biography for each participant and 5 bibliographic entries for 
the entire panel.

*Workshop proposal:*

The emphasis of the workshop is on an open and unstructured exchange of 
ideas and techniques between all workshop participants. Workshops will 
consist of five or six opening statements that amount to 40 minutes in 
total (5-7 minutes for each statement), with the remaining time 
dedicated to discussion. Workshop proposals require a title, a 300-word 
description of the workshop, five keywords that identify the workshop’s 
focus, 50-word description of each contribution with filmmakers welcome 
to add 20 minutes materials (via link),* a *100-word biography for each 
participant and 5 bibliographic entries for the entire workshop.

*Conversation proposal:*

We continue with the format introduced for VEXXVII that consists of a 
45-minute conversation between three participants, reliant on 
cross-disciplinary exchanges between artists and scholars around shared 
investigations of concepts, sites, sensibilities and histories. The 
conversation will be based on work (screeners or papers) that were 
circulated in advance. Presenters will be asked to send a paper of 1,500 
words MAX, or for artists, excerpts or a complete work, /at least two 
weeks before the conference/. The conversation itself will be based on 
the pre-circulated essays and visual materials. Conversation proposals 
require a title, 200-word description of the general theme, five 
keywords that identify the conversation’s focus, 200-word abstract for 
each paper or film; and for filmmakers 20 minutes materials (via link), 
and a 100-word biography for each participant.

*Presentation proposal (open call): *

Individual presentation proposals can be submitted through the open 
call. Individual presentations will be allotted 15 minutes for each 
presenter. Accepted presentations will be programmed into panels with 
other individual presentation submissions. Individual presentation 
proposals require a title, five keywords that identify the 
presentation’s focus.


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