Meetings and workshops

The workshop Documentary Practices after 1989: Forms, Media, Materialities, held at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Zagreb, on 24–25 September 2026, explored the various ways in which post-1989 European literatures establish and problematize their relationship to extraliterary reality. Taking questions of referentiality and the mimetic contract as its point of departure, presentations by all project team members examined diverse forms, media, and materialities of the documentary—from archives, testimonies, family histories, and objects to diaries, theatre, poetry, and ecological traces. The discussions focused in particular on the epistemological and ethical status of the document: what makes a document a document; what kinds of knowledge and access to past or present reality it enables; how its referential and evidentiary value is transformed through processes of literary shaping, mediation, and remediation; and where the boundaries lie between the document as evidence, as material trace, and as an aesthetically produced effect of reality. Particular attention was paid to the tension between documentary claims to reality and the inevitable mediation involved in any literary representation of it, as well as to the ethical questions arising from this tension. For the next workshop, the participants agreed to narrow the scope of inquiry by focusing on a more sharply defined theoretical problem that emerged from the conceptual and methodological challenges encountered in their individual research.
On February 13, 2026, the project team members and the project leader had their first working meeting. Plans for individual activities (conferences and field research) were further detailed during the meeting, and September 2026 was decided upon as the date for the first scientific research workshop. The workshop will be attended by every member of the research team. Following their own distinctive research plans, they will collaborate on creating the corpus of analysis and establishing common methodological frameworks. As a way to achieve this, the group proposed to create a shared folder where members of the home institution's research team would store and share theoretical and literary-historical literature. Each member of the home institution's research team also gave a brief presentation of their research plan, which generated a productive discussion on potential additions and elaborations to the individual plans. In accordance with their respective areas of expertise (literary-historical and theoretical), each team member responded to the discussion.