GRK 2132:  Documentary Practices. Excess and Privation

• Subject Area: Art History, Music, Theatre and Media Studies
• Term: since 2016
• Website: Homepage
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 265592318

The group’s research programme is guided by the thesis that the specific authority of the documentary form can be described by way of investigation of the operations that – within the framework of various institutions and practices and in the manner particular to each of them – arrange visual, textual and audio media elements, in order to orient the readability, expressive value and power effects of that which is documented. In the first funding phase, the research agenda centred on the structures of documentary relations of authentication and on new, primarily online-based forms of documentary subjectification and knowledge production. The second phase will now develop a concept of becoming-a-document that takes account both of current, digitally driven tendencies towards an everyday ubiquity of documentary practices and of politically motivated rejections (posttruth, fake news) of any documentary guarantee of truth. This documentary excess first became apparent with the emergence of analogue media in the nineteenth century; the group’s research will focus on media refractions of this excess (literary, artistic, theatrical, filmic), which can be found in counter-documentary selection effects, disruptions and diversions of the drive to total documentation of reality, and raise questions about a documentary power of judgement. The next stage of the research agenda also places greater emphasis on studying documentation as a mode of artistic and aesthetic processual self-questioning and self-historicisation that engages with archival or selfassembled corpora and departs from an emphasis on documentary realisms and verisms in favour of a metadocumentary praxis of presentation and commentary. The participating disciplines will continue to ensure fruitful interdisciplinary exchange in the second funding phase too, something that is essential in order to investigate documentary practices in their various systematic and historical forms. The group’s links to relevant research institutions at the university as well as the prestigious national and international partners ensure that researchers in the group are integrated into international academic networks right from an early stage in their careers.

• DFG Programme: Research Training Groups
• Applicant Institution: Ruhr-Universität Bochum
• Spokesperson: Professor Dr. Friedrich Balke
• Participating Researchers: Professorin Dr. Natalie Binczek; Professorin Dr. Astrid Deuber-Mankowsky; Professor Dr. Jörn Etzold; Professor Dr. Oliver Fahle; Professor Dr. Stefan Rieger; Professor Dr. Simon Rothöhler; Professorin Dr. Monika Schmitz-Emans; Professorin Dr. Anna Tuschling; Professorin Dr. Annette Urban; Professorin Dr. Yvonne Wübben