[Commlist] Cinéma & Cie - Call for Essay no. 42

CfE 42 - Guerrilla Images. Aesthetics and Politics of Moving Images in 
Contemporary Uprisings
Call for Essays for the thematic section of Cinéma & Cie no. 41, edited 
by Kathrin Fahlenbrach, Giuseppe Previtali, and Giacomo Tagliani.


So far, the 21st century could be labelled as the century of uprisings. 
As difficult as it is to historicize a multifaceted phenomenon that 
looks rather elusive and constantly changing, one cannot underestimate 
the ground-breaking role played by events such as the anti-WGO 
demonstrations in Seattle (1999) and Genoa (2001) in informing the 
new millennium’s imagination. In 2011, the so-called Arab Springs and 
the 15-M Movement in Madrid also made blatantly evident that this new 
wave of revolts is strictly connected to the latest development in the 
media ecosystem (Hartle and White 2021), showing the mutual bind between 
technical (re)producibility and the effectiveness (or even 
the possibility) of political action (Rovisco 2017; Snowdon 2020). 
Nowadays, mass uprisings are still one of the most representative 
phenomena within the global political scenario (Clover 2016), from the 
United States to the Middle East and to Taiwan. In turn, throughout 
these decades such uprisings have produced an increasing volume of 
audiovisual documentation which is spread all over the world in real 
time, enabling new professionalisms to emerge (Ristovska 2021) and 
creating layered ecologies in the media/movement dynamic (Trerè 2019).

Indeed, the last two decades have witnessed the emergence and gathering 
in the public space of several collective movements which have 
highlighted – in a more or less violent way – the contradictions of the 
present from social, political, economic, and ecological points of view 
(Amato 2019). Despite their heterogeneous claims, a key feature shared 
by these movements is the effort to refunctionalize media beyond their 
original aim and scope (Anden-Papadopoulos 2013). This includes  the 
sphere of video production as a constitutive part of the acts of revolt 
(Della Ratta 2018). The continuous dialectic between the actions 
performed by the “singular-plural” body (Nancy 1996) and their 
audiovisual remediation (Mirzoeff 2017) seems to disclose a potentiality 
that is both political and aesthetic. Its features and consequences have 
only recently begun to be explored by media and visual culture studies 
(Askanius 2014; Razsa 2014; Eder, Hartmann, Tedjasukmana 2020; McGarry 
et al. 2020).

 From this perspective, addressing uprisings demands a multifocal point 
of view. One the one hand, it requires the capability of considering the 
specificity of the revolts as they are situated in a certain historical 
and geographical context: the case of Gezi Park in Turkey is emblematic, 
but it would also be possible to refer to the site-specifity 
of uprisings on a larger scale, reflecting for instance on a 
Mediterranean way in the elaboration of strategies, topics and acts. On 
the other hand, it is necessary to identify the features of the 
different audiovisual practices shared by participants all over the 
world: for instance, carrying moving images (like eyewitness videos) of 
the victims of violence and of streets protests, a practice linking the 
Black Lives Matter movement and Middle eastern protesters. This 
also includes different types of moving images getting increasingly 
influential in current political conflicts and protests, such as 
web-documentaries or mobilizing informative videos, as well as user 
generated content produced by individual activist users like mash-up 
videos or video-selfies on TikTok (cf. Eder/Tedjasukmana 2020; 
Fahlenbrach 2020).

This multifocality is not limited to synchronic aspects, but it also 
involves the diachronic dimension. In fact, such a gaze should 
constantly adhere to the present but nevertheless be able to establish 
relationships with the past. This means that it needs to investigate 
with an archaeological approach those phenomena and circumstances which 
seem to predict questions that have become inescapable today, such as 
the role of female agency in the case of the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo, 
the construction of a police gaze in response to the riots of 1968 in 
Paris (Scheppe 2021), or the “reinvention of the audiovisual beyond the 
cinema as a technological mechanism and ideological institution” 
occurred in the 1970s (Goddard 2018, 193). Didi-Huberman (2016, 2019, 
2021) has recently shown the productivity of this approach, which aims 
to revisit key moments in the history of images by looking for those 
moments of tension that have somehow anticipated the contemporary ways 
of contesting the political.

This special issue intends to promote a transdisciplinary reflection on 
the role that moving images and video technologies play within 
uprisings. In fact, still images and pictures have been the object of 
several inquiries, whereas audiovisual media have been less 
investigated. Thus, this issue is fostering further analyses that 
highlight the specific features and mechanism of audiovisual making 
meaning in political protest. We particularly encourage 
transdisciplinary researches that can put into dialogue media and visual 
studies with different approaches (e.g. queer and postcolonial studies). 
Possible topics include, but are not limited to:

• Specific case studies of the role of moving images in the context of 
contemporary uprisings;
• Themes and aesthetics: are there distinctive audiovisual features 
characterizing uprisings according to their core theme? What aesthetic 
conventions have developed in the mediation of specific protest themes?
• How do current social-media-technologies and environments influence 
the aesthetics and impacts of contesting moving images?
• How do uprisings affect the present-day media ecology?
• History of moving images in revolt: how did past uprisings anticipate 
contemporary audiovisual practices?
• How can videos of uprisings be understood within and beyond the 
paradigm of witnessing? How are these videos narrated and 
re-appropriated in the contemporary mediasphere?
• How can we archive, preserve, and disseminate the memory of uprisings 
in the digital scenario? What specific role do traditions of cinema, 
visual arts, and contemporary media play in this context?
• Revolts against images: iconoclasm and iconoclash (Latour and Weibel 
2002) as audiovisual tactics in contemporary uprisings


Bibliography

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Anden-Papadopoulos K. (2013), Citizen camera-witnessing: Embodied 
political dissent in the age of mediated mass self-communication, in New 
Media & Society, 16/5: 753-769.
Askanius, T. (2014), Videos for Change. In: K. Wilkins et. al. 
(eds.), The Handbook of Development Communication and Social Change, New 
Jersey, John Wiley: 3453–470.
Butler J. (2015), Notes Towards a Performative Theory of Assembly, 
Harvard, Harvard University Press.
Clover J. (2016), Riot. Strike. Riot. The New Era of Uprisings, 
London-New York, Verso.
Crimp D. (1989), Mourning and Militancy, in October, 53: 3-18.
Della Ratta D. (2018), Shooting a Revolution. Visual Media and Warfare 
in Syria, London, Pluto Press.
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l’histoire 6, Paris, Les Éditions de Minuit.
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Paris, Les Éditions de Minuit.
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on Fire, London-New York, Verso.
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(2020), The Aesthetics of Global Protest. Visual Culture and 
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Algorithms, , London-New York, Routldge.



Submission details

Please send your abstract (from 300 to 500 words, in English or French) 
and a short biographical note to (kathrin.fahlenbrach /at/ uni-hamburg.de) 
<mailto:(kathrin.fahlenbrach /at/ uni-hamburg.de)>, (giuseppe.previtali /at/ unibg.it) 
<mailto:(giuseppe.previtali /at/ unibg.it)>, and (giacomo.tagliani /at/ unipa.it) 
<mailto:(giacomo.tagliani /at/ unipa.it)> by August 31st, 2023. Authors will be 
notified of abstract proposal acceptance by September 30th, 2023.
If the proposal is accepted, the author(s) will be asked to submit the 
full article (in English or French) by December 15th, 2023. All article 
submissions should include: 5 keywords, name of author(s), institutional 
affiliation, contacts details and a short bio for each author.
The articles must not exceed 5.000/6.000-words. Submission of a paper 
will be taken to imply that it is unpublished and is not being 
considered for publication elsewhere.
Contributions will be submitted to double blind peer review.
The issue no. 42 of Cinéma & Cie will be published in June 2024.
Cinéma & Cie promotes open-access knowledge and no payments or article 
processing charges will be required.

Deadlines

Submission of proposals: August 31st, 2023
Acceptance of proposals notified by: September 30th, 2023
Submission of full articles for peer review: December 15th, 2023
Publication: June 2024

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