Living Archive: A Study Day on Feminist Moving Image Culture
When:
—
Venue:
Birkbeck 43 Gordon Square
Living Archive: A Study Day on Feminist Moving Image Culture
Friday 25 September, 11:00-17:00
Birkbeck Cinema, 43 Gordon Square
An archive of feminist moving image culture from the 1970s and 1980s survives unevenly: complete works beside fragments, fragments beside descriptions, descriptions beside blank space. Where the usual response treats absence as a problem to solve, this study day asks: what if incompleteness were not a deficiency, but the archive's structuring condition?
Rather than the archival 'house arrest' Jacques Derrida described, the model of a 'living archive' is closer to Griselda Pollock's virtual museum or Lis Rhodes' 'crumpled heap' of history--not a fixed repository to protect, but an ongoing, collective practice, where gaps function as questions, fragments as evidence, and gathering itself as method.
Join us for shared discussion, an exploratory workshop and presentations from archivists, curators, artists and scholars, followed by a BIMI public screening, exploring how a living feminist archive might be reimagined, recovered and reactivated, as the fragility of historic feminist film and video feels ever more urgent.
Schedule
11am–1pm: Welcome, coffee, and How to Reconstruct a Lost Feminist Film — a workshop by Sarah Wood (sarahwoodworld.com) and Selina Robertson (Club des Femmes) on strategies for feminist archival reconstruction.
1–2pm: Lunch
2–4pm: Presentations from Sonia García López (Universidad Carlos III de Madrid) on reconstructing Rosina Prado's Prijodiat y ujodiat poezda (Trains Will Come and Go, 1961); Damilola Lemomu on curating Black women's moving image histories in the June Givanni Pan African Cinema Archive; Charlotte Procter and Reman Sadani of the Cinenova Working Group on access and circulation of the Cinenova collection; and Erika Tan on creative speculations and fabulations in the archive.
4–5pm: A Feminist Living Archive for the Future? — open discussion on reimagining feminist archival practice.
This event is supported by CREAM, University of Westminster, with additional support from Faculty Strategic Research and Innovation Fund at Birkbeck.
Contact name: Matthew Barrington
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