The Document and Transmedial Poetics.

Commencing with brief presentations by IAWIS board members, various
aspects of the document and transmedial poetics will be highlighted. During the break, there will be an opportunity to complement the discussed content with a exhibition tour. The
day will conclude with the Inaugural Max Nänny Lecture. The workshop will be partly onsite and online.

[1] Short Presentations by IAWIS Board members
BG2, UvA: Turfdraagsterpad 15-17, 1012 XT Amsterdam, room 012 (on-site only)
13:30 - 15:30 h

The co-converers of the 2026 IAWIS conference in Amsterdam (24-28 August 2026) will host the afternoon, welcome all and introduce the speakers. They are: Christa-Maria Lerm Hayes, Emilie Sitzia, Erin La Cour, Louis Hartnoll, Matthijs Engelberts, Mia You, Rik Spanjers, and Alice Twemlow.

The paper titles and speakers in the afternoon session are:

“Splicing” as Political and Artistic Decisions
Liliane Louvel, Université de Poitiers, https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Liliane-Louvel

A Medial-Material Grammatology of Teju Cole’s Photographic Writing
Tilo Reifenstein, York St. John University, https://ray.yorksj.ac.uk/profile/2029

Intermediality and the Textualized Nonhuman
Sophie Aymes, Université de Poitiers, https://cv.hal.science/sophie-aymes-stokes

In the break, there is opportunity to view the following exhibition at BG2, 2nd floor:

[2] Exhibition Tour: Pavel Büchler, What the Cleaners Found I On-site only

"There is a small edition of books produced by Pavel Büchler in 1996 called What the Cleaners Found which in many ways captures something of the essence of his work and why it stands out amongst the overproduction typical of contemporary art now. Produced as a series of very modest publications, the edition gathers together a number of years' experience of [...] working in an art school. Extended beyond the art school condition, it probably says much about living in Europe
over the last sixty years. Like Büchler’s work based on his illustrious predecessors, Beckett or Kafka, this piece recognizes our limitations but does something extraordinary and precise, nevertheless."
Charles Esche

An artist, teacher and occasional writer, Pavel Büchler, was born in Prague. In 1981 he emigrated to Britain and lives in Manchester. He was Head of Fine Art at the Glasgow School of Art and later Research Professor at Manchester Metropolitan University. He writes on contemporary art, photography, film and art education, has co-edited several anthologies of critical writing, and is the author of Ghost Stories: Stray Thoughts on Photography and Film (1999). A selection of his writing since 1986, Somebody's Got to Do It, was published by Ridinghouse, London, in 2016. https://www.tanyaleighton.com/artists/pavel-buechler.

The text works and drawings in this collection were first produced as individual publications on an office photocopier and a laser printer at Glasgow School of Art in 1995/96. Their sources were various institutional documents – course and disciplinary regulations, handbooks and reports, the payroll, the artist’s own CV, official correspondence, and found printed matter.
The exhibition is curated by Christa-Maria Lerm Hayes.

[3] Inaugural Max Nänny Lecture
28 March, 16.00-18.00 UvA, Oudemanhuispoort, room C 2.17, and
online: https://uva-live.zoom.us/j/89880783769

This lecture and preceding IAWIS panel are organized by IAWIS (International Association of Word and Image Studies) in collaboration with the Amsterdam School of Cultural Analysis (ASCA, https://asca.uva.nl), specifically the ASCA Word & Image research group, and NICA, the Dutch Research School of Cultural Analysis.

Catherine Gander (Max Nänny Prize winner 2023): Extending the Document: Contemporary Transmedial Poetics

For the inaugural Max Nänny lecture, I'd like to offer some thoughts from the project I'm working on, which is called 'Extending the Document: Contemporary Transmedial Poetics'. Thinking about the turn in documentary poetry toward formal and medial hybridity on and beyond the page, the book takes as its starting point Muriel Rukeyser’s lifelong advocacy of the aesthetic and political potentiality of contact between models of knowledge and creativity, encapsulated in her repeated dictum that “poetry can extend the document”.
I consider contemporary poetry that works in a documentary vein to materialise (and dematerialise) language in various ways, often via visual, installation, and conceptual art. I'd like to theorise how practitioners of transmedial poetics – Layli Long Soldier, Cecilia Vicuńa, Bhanu Kapil, and Claudia Rankine among them – adapt docpo techniques (e.g. parataxis, quotation, collage, found material, etc.), and adhere to its ideological investment in social justice in order to open new, shared, embodied spaces between verbal and visual textualities.
It is no coincidence that the majority of these poetic experiments at the intersections of word and image are by BIPOC or BAME poets, and by female and non-binary poets in particular. So the lecture will explore how the transgressive, transformative, and resistive capacities of transmedial poetics create new ways to respond to social realities and injustices that include racism, femicide, displacement, migration, exile, and extractive, settler colonialism.
In the afternoon to lead up to this lecture, a number of shorter papers will be delivered by IAWIS Board members (supported by NICA)