“I have nothing more to say.”

Analysing the spring of eco-political documentaries to emerge from Narmada Bachao Andolan, scholar Bishnupriya Ghosh notes several moments of disjuncture that haunt the genre (2009). The above statement, made by Bhula Moti and translated here to English, marks the end of a testimony in Anand Patwardhan and Simantini Dhuru’s film A Narmada Diary (1995), with the speaker turning their back to the camera, signifying the limits of articulating ecological loss. Ghosh notes that this lexical limit is accompanied by a symbolic rupture—the testimonies speak of a home that once was, while the frame relays an altered landscape. As the camera zooms towards the dam, the rupture extends onward, widening the discursive space between testimony and image, the filmmakers and landscape, the edited film and its scattered viewership. 

In the second edition of Writing Natures, we invite pitches that explore the construction and situating of natures in the “document” and the “documentary” form. Such entangled documents are created through technologies of capture and testimony elicitation, and modalities of authorship and craft. In Beyond Story Manifesto (2018), Alisa Lebow and Alexandra Juhasz, state that “Forms are cultural, political, and ethical commitments in their own right.” Documentary forms, ranging from documentary media and activist artmaking to governance records, use storytelling and other craft techniques to reassemble the complex processes of ecology and the dynamism of situatedness into fixed media surfaces. While creative practitioners seek to “find” and relay stories rooted in nature, governmental records position nature as a “storyless” collection of information in reports and policy documents. These gestures reveal that natures and their transfer to documentary formats, however reflexive or diverse in their sources, can often enact histories of processual erasure, absence, and inaudibility.

What do “storytelling” and “data gathering”—often viewed as disparate modes of narrating natures—eclipse, restrict, assimilate, and obfuscate? Can focalizing natures in our engagement with documents alert us to understanding capture and craft as enactments of power in diverse projects—from itinerant and dislocated creative projects and documentaries to standardised indices of measurement by agencies? 

We are interested in pitches that activate methodologies to critically examine the “document” as a form in mediating natures. We look forward to engagement with projects that are subverting or refusing narrative power and extractive artmaking across formats and notional sites, and exploration of strategies that read mediated natures through a practice of critical fabulation (Hartman, 2008) and counterlistening (Ouzounian, 2020), attuning us to the echoes of insurgent matter, fugitive frequencies, spectral interruptions, processual slippages and mishappenings, glitches and corruption resonant within documents as insubordinate vitalities. We invite critical essays, text and image compositions, fiction, creative nonfiction, comics, scripts, reportage, personal essays, poems, photo essays, texts, research-led and experimental writings, annotated stills, audio recordings, compositions, dialogues and conversations, manifestos, open letters, and any experimental forms not listed here.