The questions of 'truth' and 'veracity' structure Pallavi Paul's practice. Her work stages the interventionist potential of the ‘record’ as an aesthetic question. The documentary does not appear as a simple image category, but as an ecology of materials, networks, global alliances, and systems of public thought. To assess the power of these forms, she will present a discussion around her film works that deal with the tension between countenancing the world—working with the complex transference between sensation, history, memory, and reality—and representing the world, which often presumes a positivist capture of everyday life. The discussion will also be informed by the fact that everyday life now is pervaded by diverse kinds of non-fiction materials. Whether as memes, WhatsApp ‘forwards’, social media posts, 24x7 news coverage, Twitter threads, this material percolates our most intimate spaces while simultaneously open to public scrutiny. Paul will attempt to take stock of this double pull between the increasing pervasiveness of documentary materials and a growing public suspicion around their veracity. Through this method, she hopes to use the debris of monolithic ideological claims, scientific determinism, and historical absolutism as generative materials.