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Call for papers: On the Irreducibility of Visibilities to Statements (Visible Evidence XVII) Visible Evidence, the ambulatory international conference on documentary, will hold its 17th edition at Bogazici University in Istanbul, Turkey, from 9-12 August 2010. Hosted by docIstanbul, a non-profit training, research, policy and networking center focusing on documentary film at Bogazici University, Visible Evidence XVII marks the first time that the preeminent documentary studies conference takes place in Turkey, or for that matter, anywhere in the ‘Middle East’. On the Irreducibility of Visibilities to Statements: Documentary Approaches to the Audiovisual Archive Visible Evidence XVII conference panel orgs. André Dias, Susana Duarte / Universidade Nova de Lisboa Documentary film constitutes a privileged archeological practice for understanding the orders of experience in a given historical moment. But within these orders, as Foucault pointed out, “what we see never lies in what we say, and vice-versa”. This incommensurability between ‘visibilities’ and statements was explicitly put forward by both Deleuze’s reading of Foucault’s archeology of knowledge/genealogy of power and the problematic of cinema. Further theoretical developments by John Rajchman, David Rodowick and Tom Conley of the above intuition didn’t manage to completely account for the specific position of cinema, and especially documentary, within this problematic. In fact, we are lacking a philosophical ‘foundation’ of the audiovisual archive’s emergence that would bring documentary to a different level of intelligibility. The proliferation of these disjunctions in contemporary documentaries – like the interpenetration of institutions by speech and technological and architectonic structures in Wiseman’s series, or the detailed archeological analysis of media and technologies by Farocki, or Lanzmann’s ‘dispositif’ relying almost solely on spoken testimonies, or Rithy Panh’s articulation of gestures and testimonies which create paradoxical spaces, etc. – are very significant cases of world ‘framings’ that, each in their own way, through the exteriorization of the sayable regarding the seeable and vice-versa, and through their confrontation within a given epoch, give us a mode of manifestation and an exile to reality’s richness and ambiguity as well as an access to the complex strata that composes it. All this amounts finally to a function of documentary that cannot be neglected, providing the visibilities lacking in so many technological, juridical and political statements that surround us, and thus constructing ‘monuments’ against the more circumscribed archival of experience. This panel welcomes contributions that further develop this connection between documentary film and the problem of the irreducibility of visibilities to statements. Call for panel-specific paper proposals deadline: 12 March 2010 If you are interested in participating in the Conference, send a paper proposal directly to the chair(s) of the panel – André Dias and/or Susana Duarte – by March 12th. The panel chairs will confirm line-ups and notify the conference committee by March 19th.