The local site that can be accessed through this link.
In the second half of the twentieth century, emergent audiovisual culture actively participated in the expansion of democratic practices and horizons. Technologies such as Super 8mm, 16mm cameras with sound, Sony Portapaks, and successive video formats enlarged the realm of possibilities for independent filmmaking—amateur, experimental, documentary, militant, and subjective essay forms. These disruptive formats articulated diversities in virtual public spaces that are now threatened to shrink. Pre-digital, now-obsolete media risk being lost or excluded from contemporary AI-operated digital systems, even though works and tendencies within this heterogeneous repertoire may offer crucial resources for imagining futures under current political and technological constraints.
The XXXII Visible Evidence Conference invites reflection on the constitution, connection, and activation of audiovisual archives, and on how they might potentially be constituted otherwise. It seeks to examine how audiovisual archives emerge from different historical, institutional, and geopolitical conditions, especially in relation to the safeguarding of experimental and dissident works. Audiovisual archives are not merely repositories but spaces of meaning production, where memory, history, and cultural practices are articulated. They have shaped poetic strategies, documentary narratives, and essayistic forms depending on the discursive choices of filmmakers and essayistic filmmakers.
Debates concerning archives and documentary—understood in expanded terms—are rooted in the very constitution of the field. Some approach the archive through the notion of the trace and the record, recalling that the Greek arkhē simultaneously signifies origin and command. From this perspective, policies of collection, selection, organization, and access foreground how institutional, technological, and political decisions shape visibility while marginalizing other narratives.
In this sense, considering experimental film, video art, essay forms, performances, installations, and documentary collections from non-hegemonic and antipodal contexts broadens the understanding of documentary within the media universe. Documentary appears not only as an audiovisual product but as a continuous process traversed by power relations, symbolic disputes, and transformations in regimes of knowledge circulation.
Although the conference encourages submissions engaging with these overarching concerns, proposals for panels, individual papers, workshops, and screenings may address any aspect of documentary screen cultures, histories, theories, and practices.