A Paper in the Margins - Presenting at the 2026 INEFF Conference
- Editor
- Jun 3
- 1 min read
I'm glad to share that my paper, "Margins as memory: suspended traces of life and absence," will be presented at the 2026 International Network of Experimental Fiction Film Conference, held at the University of Salford in Manchester on 18–19 June 2026.
The paper began with a small obsession: the marks children left in the margins of medieval and nineteenth-century manuscripts. Doodles, scratches, half-formed sketches, gestures pushed to the edge of the page, neither part of the official text nor fully separate from it. I'm interested in them not as damage or defacement, but as a form of memory and expression that manages to survive at the periphery of official language, attached to the authority of the text while quietly resisting it.
From there, the paper moves into my own practice. The scratches on film stock, the degraded image, the ambient sound, the small interruptions I work with — I've come to think of these as a kind of cinematic marginalia. They carry affective and historical weight that sits beyond words, and they tend to suspend meaning rather than explain it: something held in texture, rhythm, and absence.
This paper was initially started with the guidance of Christina Botsou, and I'm grateful for where that early conversation led.
The full conference programme is available here.
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