"Silences, Stories, and Migration: Digitising and Remediating Personal Archives"
Workshop Leader: Nada El-Omari and Jean-Pierre Marchant
Tuesday, January 16, 2024. 4:30-6 PM EST. Free. Online / Zoom.
Nada El-Omari, current artist in residence at CineMobilia, and Jean-Pierre Marchant, Director of Operations at CineMobilia, have been talking and making films with family archives for several years. In this workshop Nada and Jean-Pierre will discuss their shared interest in silences, stories, migration, and grief in family photos and home movies. They will also address the technical and artistic benefits and challenges involved in digitising and remediating these personal archives.
See below for the recording of this online workshop:
SPEAKER BIOS
Jean-Pierre Marchant is a filmmaker and graduate of the York MFA program in Film and Media Studies. He is currently the Director of Operations for CineMobilia, a mobile media digitisation lab at York. When he isn’t trying to repair and maintain faulty media cassette decks or keep media digitisation workflows running smoothly, he works as a freelance video editor and colourist and teaches film classes at universities and other institutions. Combining his academic background in history with an interest in preservation and decay, Jean-Pierre’s film and video practice interrogates themes such as youthfulness and glamour, Latino migration and rootlessness, working-class dreams and suburban disappointments. His shorts have screened and won awards in several festivals and art galleries including Photophobia, Trinity Square Video, the Festival of (In)Appropriation, the Calgary International Film Festival, WNDX, Antimatter [Media Art], and many more.
Nada El-Omari is a filmmaker and writer of Palestinian and Egyptian origin based in Montreal, Quebec. Her practice and research interests centre on the intergenerational transmissions of memories, displacement, and the stories of belonging and identity which she explores through a poetic, hybrid lens. Focusing on process and fragments in text, sound, and image, Nada explores new ways to self-narrate, and speak hybridity and self. Her films have recently been shown at the Wexner Centre for the Arts in Ohio, SAVAC’s Monitor 15, Images Festival Toronto, Arab Film & Media Institute NYC, Nuit Blanche Toronto, Les Instants Vidéos Friche La Belle de Mai, NYU’s Orphan Films Symposium, Belfast Film Festival, Palestine Cinema Days, Visions Cairo, Toronto Palestine Film Festival, and on Shasha and Tenk. Her work has also been published in Montreal Serai and qumra journal. Her last digital project was commissioned by the Art Gallery of Ontario in collaboration with Sonya Mwambu. El-Omari holds a BFA in Film Production and an MFA in Film from York University.
ABOUT THE ARCHIVAL ATELIER WORKSHOP SERIES
Archival Atelier is an ongoing series of workshops and talks originally started in 2022 by CineMobilia's director of operations, Jean-Pierre Marchant. Within each of these workshops, we invite artists, archivists, and researchers to walk us through a specific aspect of their work and explain how they professionally engage with processes of preservation, documentation, restoration, digitization, and/or archiving.
This semester, A/CA's Knowledge Mobilization Officer, Andrew Bailey, is organizing the Archival Atelier workshop series and has gathered a collection of practitioners who work with participatory, communal, and/or personal archives.