https://at-ceu.studyguide.timeedit.net/modules/UWC5246?type=CORE"Photographer/Artist Unknown" is an object label that puzzles museum visitors, as well as researchers in the field, and historians working with personal and found footage archives. Historical record keeping and institutional legacies are seldom as exhaustive as their encyclopedic scope and thus collections can just as much be defined by what they contain as by what (and who) they exclude. The choice of "who is in and who is out" and the reasons why only some data is preserved, is a question not of chance, but of power. The increasing demands to decolonize collections has put especially museums under much-needed stress to examine the provenance and the stories of their holdings. But decolonizing a photography collection reaches a higher level of complexity when the maker is an "unknown photographer". This course centers on the photography collection of the Weltmuseum Wien, targeting a selection out of the 75 000 photographs tagged with "unknown photographer". Our lack of knowledge about the photographer blurs the context in which the image was produced, erases their relation to the depicted sitter or object, and makes the museum's motivation in collecting the images more strenuous to decipher.Behind the scenes of the museum, students will attempt to identify the maker, if possible, and/or use the theoretical premise of cultural historian Saidiya Hartman's "critical fabulation" as a creative tool to reflect upon this information gap. Hartman employed this notion as an answer to the limitations offered by official archives about slavery and its afterlife; a limitation which arguably extends to all collections. The purpose of critical fabulation is, however, not merely to give photographs a voice but to rely on storytelling and speculative narration to rebalance historical omissions while (!) making manifest the impossibility of such a form of storytelling. Critical fabulation seeks to "tell an impossible story", and to intentionally test the limits of reconstructing a history of injustice as it is embedded in museum collections and in photography.The course offered by Dr. Hanin Hannouch, curator of the Photography Collection of Weltmuseum, and Klara Trencsenyi, documentary filmmaker using archival footage in her practice, prepares students for the production of creative work using the visual holdings of the Weltmuseum Wien. It explores various methodologies to produce a visual project, guiding the students through from the basics of visual language to the fundamental principles of visual storytelling, while also touching on theoretical frameworks for image production, use of 1collections and critical fabulation. Straddling both the presence and absence of historical records, coming to terms with the impossibility of uncovering some information about the photos, grasping the limitations of photography as a visual medium of history are integral to this seminar. The course is formed of lectures, workshop assignments, student presentations, and screenings. Whilst each lecture will cover basics of visual practice, the workshops will be their hands-on practice. The final project will be a visual project chosen by the students. It can be a photo essay, a blog, a visual presentation of a research project, a short film, a comic strip, or any other proposal that will be approved by the instructors.