[Commlist] CfP: Arts in the Documentary, Art of the Documentary - "La Valle dell'Eden", n.49

/Call for Paper: Arts in the Documentary, the Art of Documentary: 
//Encounters, Entanglements, Engraftments / //"La Valle dell'Eden", n.49 
/ /Edited by Maria Ida Bernabei and Paolo Villa
Nonfiction and documentary cinema has long sustained a complex and 
shifting relation to the broader system of the arts and to the diverse 
forms of artistic creation. Over time, this nexus has delineated a 
capacious and multifaceted field of inquiry which, beginning in the late 
1980s, has entered a particularly fertile phase of scholarship across 
historical, philosophical, semiotic, and sociological perspectives.This 
relationship takes shape through a plurality of productions and 
theoretical discourses that have accompanied the development of 
reflections on remediation and on cinematic intermediality, beginning 
with the post-war “golden age” of the film on art, which saw Italy, 
France, and Belgium emerge as pre-eminent on a particularly complex 
international stage, where numerous national productions contributed to 
the development of this intrinsically transmedial genre (Villa 2022; 
Albera, Le Forestier, Robert 2011; Jacobs, Cleppe, Latsis 2021; Aliaga 
Cárceles, Cánovas Belchí 2023).
The production of documentaries connected with the field of the visual 
arts, and the reciprocal exchanges between documentary and artistic 
practices, have not ceased in the ensuing decades; rather, they have 
come to constitute a distinct genre within documentary cinema, marked by 
specific characteristics, a historicized tradition, and contemporary 
articulations that have been explored in studies on the mediatization of 
the arts (Marra, Manzoli 2018; Hallas 2020), which also address the 
increasingly prominent role taken on by television (Grasso, Trione 
2014). This landscape has been further enriched by the so-called 
“Documentary turn” (Bertozzi 2018: 7), which over the past fifteen years 
has reshaped the system of contemporary art through exhibitions, 
festivals, and publications devoted to the hybridization of documentary 
practices and the contemporary art world. This shift has fostered 
epistemological interest in documentary as a mode of knowledge 
production; aesthetic interest in its forms (interviews, voice-over, 
found footage, reenactment, observational modes); and institutional 
interest in its function within exhibition spaces and on digital 
platforms (Foster 1996; Balsom 2013; Balsom and Peleg 2016; Bertozzi 
2012; Rascaroli 2009; Corrigan 2011).
It is within this complex landscape that issue 49 of /La Valle 
dell’Eden/ sets out to address the dialogue between documentary and 
artistic practices, both in the sense of the encounter between the 
cinematic genre and the other arts—through films that illustrate, 
disseminate, narrate, and rework works, artists, collections, and 
institutions in the art world—and in the direction of film practices 
which, within the documentary paradigm, adopt paths akin to cinematic 
experimentation and artistic practices, undertaking a reflection on the 
discursive components of film language and on its intermedial 
relationship with other forms of expression.
The relationship between documentary cinema and the arts—understood in 
the broadest sense, from painting, sculpture, music, literature, 
architecture, and urban planning to fashion, design, and photography—may 
be articulated through three interrelated paradigms. First, there is the 
model of */encounter/*, in which the documentary assumes the role of a 
medium—at times purely ancillary—for illustrating, narrating, and 
disseminating art, while keeping firmly in place the distinction between 
the cinematic form and the object examined by the film, as in the 
majority of post-war art documentaries or in today’s television 
production on thematic channels. In such cases, the aim is to carry out 
a more or less explicit action of education or edutainment directed at 
the audience, relying on the transparency of the film medium so as to 
focus on the narrative contained in the artworks, on their exegesis and 
analysis, and on the biographical profile of the artist-protagonist, 
rather than on metalinguistic or transmedial elements.
Drawing on the dual capacity for /saying/showing/ (Plantinga 2005, 111) 
intrinsic to this filmic genre—manifested in the relation between 
content and the way it is narrated—the second paradigm is that of 
/*entanglement*/. In this configuration, the artistic practices 
represented, besides constituting the object of the art film, also shape 
its discursive and visual form, leading the film to assume linguistic 
and stylistic features akin to the art that is displayed, narrated, 
interpreted, or to become itself the object of a critical reflection 
articulated through language. One may think in this sense of Carlo 
Ludovico Ragghianti’s /critofilms/, in which the directorial form is 
predetermined by the work itself, which “dictates” to the filmmaker the 
conditions of viewing necessary to arrive at a critical and hermeneutic 
understanding by working through the filmic language rather than merely 
relying on it; or of “processual” films that reveal the act of creation 
and the constitutive logics of a completed work in front of the camera 
through ad hoc visual devices that bring the camera close to the 
artist’s hand, the canvas to the screen, as in /Jackson Pollock 51/ by 
Hans Namuth, crucial for the very definition of action painting 
(Frangne, Mouëllic, Viart 2009). To come to the contemporary scene, one 
might consider /The Art of Design/, in which Olafur Eliasson provides 
the interpretive coordinates of his work by activating participatory 
processes through the audiovisual medium; /No Predicted End/, which 
narrates the separation of Marina Abramović and Ulay, presenting in 
split screen the installation format of their final work together; or 
the symbiotic dialogue between film and photography in Laura Poitras’s 
/All the Beauty and the Bloodshed/, up to the proliferation of hybrid 
narrative forms in /fashion/ and /architectural films/.
Finally, with the model of the /*engraftment*/, we refer to those 
cases—now numerous within contemporary art—in which the documentary 
paradigm is taken up by the languages of artistic creation and expanded 
cinema, opening onto hybrid yet fertile territories of exchange between 
contemporary art practices and the audiovisual image thanks to 
contemporary filmmakers, artists, and videomakers (Pearce, McLaughlin 
2007). One need only consider, within the Italian context alone, the 
works of Yuri Ancarani, Michelangelo Frammartino, Massimo D’Anolfi and 
Martina Parenti, or Beka & Lemoine. In such cases, documentary, 
expanding beyond the traditional notion of film, becomes in turn a 
public art project, video installation, archival or found-footage 
reworking, performance, reenactment, or autobiography.
Clearly, this threefold framework is meant to /situate/ the complex 
issues that arise from the relations between images and objects, between 
media, artistic practices, and aesthetic discourses—each with its own 
specific features yet strongly interrelated—without imposing an 
excessively constraining schema. Our aim is not to provide a rigid 
tripartite grid to be strictly followed, but rather to propose malleable 
yet heuristically useful categories, which in practice may themselves 
intersect, interfere with one another, and hybridise in the making (or 
the analysis) of a documentary or an audiovisual work.
Within this broad horizon—ranging between documentary and artistic 
practices, between filmmakers and artists, between cinematic and museum 
institutions, from the critical mediation of art to linguistic 
experimentation across media, from representation to performativity—this 
issue of /La Valle dell’Eden/ seeks to gather contributions, in Italian 
and in English, devoted to historical and contemporary case studies. 
These may address, among others, the following areas (to be understood 
as purely indicative and by no means exhaustive of the possible 
approaches to the theme):

  * Documentaries on art, in historical or contemporary perspective
  * Biographical documentaries on artists
  * Television programs on art and artists
  * Documentaries on architecture and urban planning, fashion, and
    photography
  * Collaborative relationships between artists and filmmakers in
    documentary contexts
  * The documentary paradigm in twentieth- and twenty-first-century
    artistic production
  * Intersections and interferences between documentary cinema and
    contemporary art
  * Documentary, artistic practices, and museology
  * Art-documentary festivals
  * Documentary, artistic heritage, and questions of identity or
    national belonging
  * Art documentary, artistic practices, and issues of production and
    distribution
  * Documentary, artistic practices, and class, ethnic, postcolonial,
    gender, and queer perspectives
  * Documentary, artistic practices, and ecocritical / eco-sustainable
    approaches

To propose an article, please submit an abstract (max. 2,500 characters) 
in Italian or English, including up to five essential bibliographic 
references, five keywords, and a short bio (1,000 characters). Proposals 
should be sent to both editors at *(mariaida.bernabei /at/ unito.it)* and 
*(paolo.villa /at/ unipr.it)* <mailto:(paolo.villa /at/ unipr.it)>, and 
*(eden /at/ unito.it)* <mailto:(eden /at/ unito.it)> by 30 January 2026. More 
information on https://ojs.unito.it/index.php/vde/announcement 
<https://ojs.unito.it/index.php/vde/announcement>

Notification of acceptance will be sent by 15 February 2026. Complete 
essays (maximum 30,000 characters notes and bibliography included), 
written in Italian or English, must be submitted no later than 31 May 
2026 in order to be considered for double-blind peer review. No payment 
will be required to the authors for the publication.

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