CFP | Reframing the Archive 2025

Mar 17
6 min read

CALL FOR PAPERS This CFP is now closed.

HAUNTED ARCHIVES OF LIVINGNESS

VISUAL CULTURE AND THE POLITICS OF CARE

IN THE AGE OF ECOLOGICAL ENTANGLEMENT

The Archivo Platform and the Archivo Papers Journal, are pleased to announce the 5th edition of Reframing the Archive, International Conference on Photography and Visual Culture.

KEYNOTE & GUEST SPEAKERS

BERGIT ARENDS

The Courtauld, UK

XAVIER RIBAS

Visual Artist / Lecturer, Spain, UK

SUSANNE KRIEMANN

Visual Artist, Germany

“En un mundo donde son grandes biólogos, botánicos, ecólogos y zoólogos aquellos que llegan a describir en latín la mitad de lo que un agricultor analfabeto sabía del mundo vivo que le rodeaba, marquémonos un farol y vayámonos a esos mundos que parece que sólo salen en las películas de Tarzan y en la televisión.”

[In a world where great biologists, botanists, ecologists and zoologists are those who can describe in Latin half of what an illiterate farmer knew about the living world around him, let’s call a bluff and go to those worlds that seem to only appear in Tarzan movies and on television.]

El Sátiro del Medio Ambiente, “Naturaleza eres tú”,

Alfalfa. Crítica Ecológica y Alternativas, nº 8/9/10, 1978, pp. 10-12

“History is telling. We need multiple, competing, unresolved, fragmentary, shattered, partial, and contradictory tales. Rather than a singular story history tells, if we open up the archives to ask different questions, other answers lurk. These are also telling. And tell them, we must.”

Banu Subramaniam

Botany of Empire. Plant Worlds and the Scientific Legacies of Colonies, 2024, X

The archive, in its variables of collecting private or public documents, relating to a person, family, municipality or state, is configured as a circumscribed place, with limited access or reserved for specific users. Its historical connection – especially the archive as institution – with power and various forms of long-standing hegemony, while it has contributed to arousing its fascination and a certain aura of mystery in recent decades, has been paralleled with a profound questioning and recognition of its problematic “neutral technology” (Azoulay, 2019).

To consider that a collection of written texts, visual works, volumes, and photographs, and moving images composes a corpus can lead us back to the etymology of the Latin term, which takes on this meaning much later. Before, it referred to a body, individual, person, or living being, as well as a corpse, inanimate body, matter, organism, and structure. If we then maintain the polysemy of the corpus to diversify the archives in which they live, we will suddenly find ourselves faced with a variety of typologies that expand the very notion of the archive, push it out of protective walls, dirty it, contaminate it and regenerate it, making it living matter and in constant metamorphosis (Coccia, 2020).

We can read this corpus as an archive that self-generates, feeds itself, feeds back, tells itself, passes on, and lets itself be consulted. A system of knowledge that owns itself as an archive, which “should be seen as a contact zone between past and present but also between temporally diverse and interconnected processes of documenting and consuming information” (Tortorici, 2018), available to be activated and put into relation in a constant becoming in transformation. What can this approach teach us about the wonder, the abject, the beauty, the waste in the planet when they become “haunted archives of livingness” (Subramaniam, 2024)? In this context, photography emerges as a central medium through which haunted archives are constituted, activated, and contested. Photographs not only preserve the visual remnants of ecological and political violence, but also act as spectral witnesses — carriers of both memory and omission. What role does the photograph play in embodying “livingness” or decay? How can photographic archives resist the logics of extractivism, classification?

Confronted with climate change, overdevelopment, ecological devastation, environmental crises, energy dependence, poverty, reproductive injustice, unsustainable agriculture, and food insecurity, to name just a few, “seeking to understand the world as embrangled in its histories is the urgent project before us.” (Subramaniam, 2024) How can we look at the geological traces, at the rivers’ flow, at the accumulation of waste, at the dialects of folk proverbs and storytelling, at “invasive” plant species, at the physical space occupied to store our digital data and see them, observe them, sense them and create through them? Would we be able to look at them with the attention devoted to documents preserved and protected in archives without falling into the trap of “classification, tagging, and naming of different groups to form a human index” (Azoulay, 2019), or – by contrast – would we be able not to forget or ignore them but rather to embrace a project of care?

Envisioning art—and cultural practices more broadly—as an empowering means at our hands to cultivate a utopia for a better liveable future, the 6th edition of the International Conference Reframing the Archive invites scholars at any stage of their careers, as well as visual artists and other professionals in the field of visual arts, to share their work and reflect on how contemporary artistic practices have been and are dealing with these haunted archives of livingness. We welcome proposals for 15-minute theory and practice-led presentations (followed by 15-minute panel discussion) from various disciplines, including: photography, cinema and new media, art history and theory, anthropology, museology, philosophy, cultural studies, visual and media studies, and fine and graphic arts. These presentations should offer an in-depth investigation into the conference topic. Please note that the conference will be conducted in English.

Potential topics include, but are not limited to:

Photographic archives and haunted image materialities
Spectrality, indexicality, and decay in photographic media
Oral histories and storytelling
More-than-human archives (geologic, spontaneous, accidental, inaccessible, toxic)
Digital archives data and their material storage’s environmental implications, where and at which cost
Non-human animal knowledges and aesthetics
Visual witnessing, non-human photography, and environmental surveillance
Aural, terrestrial, underwater waste
Machine vision, drones, and the archive of planetary sensing

SUBMITTING YOU PAPER

Paper proposals for RTA 2025 are limited to one submission per candidate and must be written in English. Submissions should follow one of the two formats outlined below:

INDIVIDUAL PAPER SUBMISSION

Individual presentations have a duration of 15 minutes.

Candidates are required to submit a proposal that includes:

— Author information (name, email, affiliation, ORCID)

— Paper title, abstract (2000 characters), and keywords (maximum 5),

— Bibliographical references (maximum 5),

— Author short biographical note (written in third person, 1000 characters).

PRE-CONSTITUTED PANEL SUBMISSION

Submission of proposals for pre-constituted panels should consist of three papers.

The panel corresponding author is requested to submit a proposal that includes:

— Panel title and abstract (2000 characters)

— Information regarding the three candidates and their individual papers, as described in the guidelines for individual papers described above.

SELECTION PROCESS & FEES

Submitted proposals will undergo a peer-review process. Authors will be notified of the results by July, 2025. The names of the Scientific Committee will be announced after the peer-review process is complete.

Selected speakers must confirm their participation and complete the registration payment within one week of receiving the selection notification. The registration fee for is 50 EUR.

Archivo Friends with an active subscription plan are entitled to a discount on the registration fee, should they be selected to present a paper. For those who wish to attend the event without presenting, general admission is free for Archivo Friends.

PUBLICATION

Following the conference, extended versions of the presented papers will be considered for publication in a forthcoming issue (2026) of Archivo Papers - Journal of Photography and Visual Culture (ISBN 2184-9218). Conference speakers are warmly invited to submit their articles, which will undergo a double-blind peer-review process.

Please note that this submission is separate from the conference application and applies exclusively to the journal publication. Those interested in contributing are encouraged to consult the journal's Editorial Guidelines and prepare their article proposals accordingly. The deadline for journal submissions is October 12, 2025.

International Symposium on Photography & Visual Culture