Archival Assembly #1
The festival Archival Assembly #1 marks the (temporary) conclusion of the five-year project „Archive außer sich“, a series of interdisciplinary research, presentation, and exhibition projects dealing with film cultural heritage and its archives. Participating institutions are Harun Farocki Institut, SAVVY Contemporary, pong film, silent green Film Feld Forschung, the International Short Film Festival Oberhausen, and the masters program “Film Culture: Archiving, Programming, Presentation” at the Goethe University Frankfurt. From September 1 to 8 film archives and film archival projects will meet for a public exchange. At the same time, the plan is for a festival that will take place biannually, understanding archival work – as well as the cinema – as an artistic, social, and political practice.
"Some of them hold to the idea of the national legacy (or genre, or historical time period), others are resistant to such ideas. Some of them are easily accessible as state archives or are closed off to the world, others have never made any inroads at all into the writing of film history. Archives and counter-archives: It seems as if neither can do without the other. But when film archives are seen, not as closed entities, but as the setting for negotiating a transnational practice, forming new alliances, perhaps the old idea of so-called 'world cinema' can shake off its power structure, allowing us to rethink both, the world and the cinema." (Stefanie Schulte Strathaus)
Four intertwined parts form the festival’s contours. At Kino Arsenal and in the HKW’s Westgarten there are daily film screenings, presentations of restorations and other projects, as well as podium discussions. The exhibition "How to find meaning in dead time" at SAVVY Contemporary, curated by Maha Maamoun and Ala Younis, and the two symposia, "After the Archive" (in collaboration with the Goethe-University in Frankfurt) in the Kuppelhalle at silent green and "The Right to a Public II" at the Filmhaus, complete the program. In addition, every morning in the Kuppelhalle at silent green and in Sinema Transtopia there will be presentations on precarious archival projects under the title "Found Futures", organized in collaboration with the Goethe-Institut, with the goal of networking and mutual support. This will also be the context for a discussion of the collectively produced paper “Call for Action and Reflection on Decolonising Film Archives.”
An overview of the festival program can be found here. A selection of the films will be presented on arsenal 3 starting the day after each screening. The two symposia will also be available via live stream. Tickets for all events at Arsenal Cinema can be reserved from August 23. For all tickets at HKW, please see here.
