This talk will engage with the project “Archive/Counter-Archive” to discuss how artists are using media archives as a medium to disrupt traditional forms of history, collection and national narrative. I look at what opportunities and ways of working with archives are coming to inform new approaches to filmmaking that are collective, collaborative and disruptive. Several films festivals in Canada have commissioned works by artists who “remediate “ archives to generate new understandings of personal media and history tied to a diversity of communities. The counter archive seeks to make visible those histories, which have been overlooked and are disappearing in the context of archival degradation and the chronic underfunding of community based archives. The project Archive/Counter-Archive brings together a large group of artist-run distribution centres in Canada along with over fourteen archival organizations to develop new strategies for preserving and accessing media works by artists. (Janine Marchessault)

 

Janine Marchessault is a writer, curator and researcher at York University in Canada where she teaches in the Department of Cinema and Media Arts. She is the director of the Archive/Counter Archive project (counterarchives.ca). Her most recent publication is Ecstatic Worlds: Media, Utopias, Ecologies (MIT 2017).

 

Thursday 06/06 | 11:30 am | Afundación Sala de Prensa