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"View. Theories and Practices of Visual Culture"Issue 7Deadline: July 20, 2014“These archives smell of vinegar and not of ashes. They are not grey.Their colors are white, light blue and green, and sepia. These are not shades of total destruction but rather of an ongoing decay.” This poetic description by Tobias Hering concerns African film archives, their condition, and our (lack of) memory of them. It might also reveal a certain aspect of a Western way of thinking which forces us torepresent postcolonial countries as colorful and entropic landscapes of ruin. However this image seems much more complex, multilayered and (while acknowledging the controversial status of this term) hybrid.What is the character of the images sitting in these archives?As a point of departure in issue 7 of “View”(3/2014) we would like to take precisely the colors and smells of non-European visual archives, and examine the narratives surrounding them. We would like to analyze the meaning of archiving / collecting / gathering in a context other than Western, and those discourses that allow one to speak of it. We would also like to address the ambivalence of Western narratives andimages which depict the “postcolonial situation”: do they reveal more of ourselves than of the countries and problems they directly relate to? Last but not least, we would like to ask: is there such a thing as a “postcolonial image” what is it like?We are especially interested in visual archives devoted to the postcolonial condition that are either institutional (e.g. Southern African Freedom Struggles, c.1950-1994) or private (e.g. Gadalla Gubara’s film archive), as well as projects dealing with the history and decline of postcolonial archives (eg. Filipa César’s work with Guinea-Bissau film archives), projects concentrated on the production of images in a postcolonial context (e.g. Jan Simon working in Nigeria, Catarina Simão undertaking the theme of film production in Mozambique), and projects devoted to images of postcolonial amnesia (e.g. Christine Meissner). We would also like to comment on images of (postcolonial) ambivalence: both historical examples (such as the films of Jean Rouch, Chris Marker’s Sans Soleil, Glauber Rocha’s O Leão de Sete Cabeças),and contemporary (Renzo Martens’ Enjoy Poverty, Jørgen Leth’s Haiti. Untitled). We are also interested in institutional aspects of this phenomenon: in the way non-European museums of photography establish their collections (e.g. Instituto Moreira Salles), and the way “postcolonial images” and their curators (e.g. Okwui Enwezor) function in the art field.For editorial and technical requirements, go to:http://widok.ibl.waw.pl/index.php/one/about/submissionsIn case of questions, email: redakcja@widok.ibl.waw.pl(Source : H-ARTHIST. Humanities-Net Discussion List for Art History)