[Commlist] CfP: Visible Evidence XXVII: Documentary and Democracy in Crisis

  Visible Evidence XXVII
  Frankfurt am Main, December 15-18 2021

Visible Evidence XXVII will take place in a hybrid format. Around half 
of the conference presentation slots will be allocated to online 
presentations for those who cannot make it to Frankfurt in person. In 
addition, the conference keynote lectures will be live streamed to those 
attending virtually. The organizing committee is currently examining 
additional means to make virtual participants and attendants further 
engaged with the in-person panels and interactions. We ask applicants to 
state in advance whether they’ll participate virtually or in person. We 
are aware that applicants’ conditions might change. We will therefore 
also ask you to confirm your form of participation (in person or 
virtually) upon receiving notification of acceptance and in mid-October, 
two months before the conference.

With the new conference layout the VE XXVII steering committee is 
particularly interested in formats that draw on previous dialogue, such 
as pre-constituted panels, workshops and conversations (see below) that 
bring together scholars and practitioners. Along with the usual open 
call for paper presentations we offer adjusted formats for the hybrid 
model and ask applicants to read carefully through the format descriptions.


    VE XXVII, 2021: Documentary and Democracy in Crisis

What we call ‘documentary’ emerged in the 1920s and 1930s in response to 
a perceived crisis of liberal democracy, as a mode of factual 
representation which empowers citizens to participate in the political 
process. As the last months have shown, the willingness or unwillingness 
of citizens to comply with policy makers have crucial effects. How 
does documentary respond to what has been widely diagnosed as the 
current crisis of democracy? What could be an adequate reaction in 
forms, themes and modes of production, to the return to nationalism and 
other forms of political tribalism in the face of global migration? In 
what ways does documentary shape our perceptions of the consequences of 
globalization, from climate change, health crisis, to the transformation 
of the economy? And how can documentary in theory and practice 
contribute to defend the spaces and modes of deliberation necessary for 
the life of democracy?

Visible Evidence, the international conference on documentary film and 
media, now in its 27th installment, will convene in Frankfurt, Germany, 
on December 15-18, 2021. Hosted by the Institute for Theatre, Film and 
Media Studies (TFM) at Goethe University, Frankfurt, Visible Evidence 
XXVII will address these and other current issues related to the 
history, theory, practice and pedagogy of documentary and non-fiction 
cinema, television, video, audio recording, digital media, photography, 
VR, games and performance in a wide range of panels, workshops, plenary 
sessions, screenings and special events. We welcome panel, workshop, 
conversation, screening and paper proposals that address documentary and 
non-fiction media from a diverse range of disciplines that can open the 
field to new lines of investigation through innovative and original 
perspectives.

Designed as a public event in collaboration with the city’s leading 
cultural institutions, the conference makes a conscious nod towards 
documentary history as an instrument of public opinion. The notion of 
crisis, a thread weaved through the history of documentary, and in light 
of current affairs seems ever more pertinent, calls for new political, 
formal and social possibilities that consolidate and expand 
documentary’s role as a space for representation and democratic 
deliberation. These new possibilities should be explored in 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 Conflict: 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 Infrastructures: How does documentary depict and expose 
industrial infrastructures? In what ways does documentary itself 
comprise, or challenge, larger social and material infrastructures, 
including funding structures, distribution platforms and new visual 
technologies?

Documentary Publics: The advent of new media platforms and technologies 
bares, on the one hand, potential for a radical reorganization of social 
bodies. On the other hand, creates 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 Non-Human: In the epoch of the Anthropocene and in 
the wake of environmental crisis, how can documentary exceed its 
“discourses of sobriety” that centers the human? How can it give form to 
the material world, traversing the representational hierarchies between 
the human and non-human? How do documentaries of nonhuman subjects 
interact with, reinforce or diverge from human political regimes?

Documentary and Operational Media: Considering the proliferation of 
tools for data analysis, image-based computational techniques and 
forensic media, how can we re-think documentary’s evidentiary claims at 
its intersections with fields such as science, medicine, design and law?

Documentary Pedagogy: How can we think of documentary pedagogy through a 
vernacular prism? How have documentary studies responded to the shifting 
labor 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 
labor 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 utilities 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 (online presenters might consider even shorter 
presentations) with ten-minutes response by the panelists’ chosen 
respondent. Panel proposals require a title; 300-word description of the 
panel itself; five keywords that identify the panel’s focus; 250-word 
abstract for each paper, or for filmmakers 200 words abstract and 20 
minutes materials (via link); 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 sum up to 40 minutes in 
total (5-7 minutes for each statement), with the remaining time 
dedicated to discussion. Workshop proposals require a title; 300-word 
description of the workshop; five keywords that identify the workshop’s 
focus; 50-word description of each contribution; filmmakers are welcome 
to add 20 minutes materials (via link); 100-word biography for each 
participant and 5 bibliographic entries for the entire workshop.

Conversation proposal:
A new format introduced for VEXXVII that consists of a 45-minute 
conversation between three participants that relies on 
cross-disciplinary exchange 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 either excerpts or a complete work, /a couple 
of 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 focus; 200-word abstract 
for each paper or film; and for filmmakers 20 minutes materials (via 
link); 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, 300-word abstract for papers and 200 words 
abstract and 20 minutes worth of screening materials (via link) for 
practitioners; 100-word biography and five bibliographic entries.

A note to filmmakers and practitioners:
To stress the interconnectedness of theory and praxis, filmmakers and 
practitioners’ talks will be integrated into all formats side by side 
with paper presentations. Filmmakers are welcome to send their materials 
according to the above instructions for each one of the formats where 
they can present excerpts of their work and contextualize it. In 
addition VE XXVII will open a Vimeo channel where selected works will be 
screened. Practitioners presenters could also add a link to their work 
to the online program.

Conversations will be allotted forty-five minutes, panels and workshops 
will be allotted one hour and forty-five minutes.

All proposals have to be submitted via EasyChair: 
https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=ve27 
<https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=ve27>.


Deadline:
All proposals are due by March 20, 2021.

Multiple submissions will not be accepted, except for panel respondents. 
Panels, workshops and conversations will be either held completely in 
person or completely virtually. If your panel/workshop/conversation 
takes place virtually you are still welcome to attend in person.

Applicants will be notified of acceptance by June 15th, 2021.
For questions please email (visibleevidence2020 /at/ gmail.com) 
<mailto:(visibleevidence2020 /at/ gmail.com)>.


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