The organizing principle of this conference is to explore the absences and elisions in our sources, our stories, our histories. Although film and media are collaborative practices, we tend to recount and rely upon the achievements of individual authors and artists. But what critical resources have proven helpful in theorizing the unacknowledged labor, visions, and artistry in our field?  How do we conceive of and write the histories of the anonymous, the nameless, and the excluded? This conference seeks to bring together a group of scholars to catalyze further reflection and research around the following questions: how does one work with and on a silenced archive, the unarticulated in an artwork, a lost or destroyed document? The means are often speculative, creative, experimental – a conjuring of voices from the data available, the tracing of lines that can be faintly read. Which raises further questions: what are the ethics of giving voice to the voiceless? How does one begin to fill in the silences in our histories and stories? And who decides whose story is told, and how? We do not mean simply to affirm or give voice to anonymity but to think about the right to anonymity and its relation to processes of abstraction and figuration, and to the means of representation.