Documenting

Documenting carries the promise of evidence, comprehensiveness, realness, and fact; it aspires to cleave time, space and social relations, and visually, materially generates (knowledge of) the world. And yet, the ways that we are trained, and train ourselves, to observe, document, record, and analyze the world are deeply historical in character (Halpern 2014). Documenting also has a long history of obscuring, erasure, and the making of alternative facts that is baked into the technologies and media it relies on. This thread engages the media of documenting—documents, documentation, and documentaries, including photography and film as well as colonial archives, databases, and cutting-edge machine learning systems—and aims at developing aesthetic vocabularies that work with and against dominant knowledge regimes and the forms of governing they support (Bruder & Suess 2024). What are modes of documenting and types of data that expose the framing and rendering of supposedly objective representations of worlds? How to leverage absences, preserve gaps, and work around non-disclosures while simultaneously situating the documenter? How to expand the possibility of collective action through positioning the intimate, diasporic, decentralized in opposition to mainstreamed optics and colonial cartographies, with the understanding that the distant “there” is anchored in the immediate “here” (Suess 2023)?