Presented by TIFF Higher Learning and Archive/Counter-Archive:

From Footnote to Main Text: Working with Minor Audiovisual Archives in Latin America with special guest Juana Suárez

FREE + open to the public! | Tickets at TIFF.net

Facebook Event
 

The culture of Latin American audiovisual archives is highly dominated by its association with official discourses and representations of national identities, as in the case of most national television and film archives. However, minor archives can include university archives, regional cinematheques, private film collectors, community archives, underground or independent archival initiatives, and small collections that are often deposited in larger institutions or housed in independent, non-archival locations. Minor archives also include the proliferation of memory institutions and political archives that have resulted from multiple political upheavals in the region, as well as from the work of minority communities. The persistence and continuous emergence of those archives is already a decolonizing practice and a manifestation of counter-archives.

With discussions about inequality in mind, and by suggesting we rethink media ecology systems, this keynote presentation illustrates how minor archives need to be more than passing references. The keynote also addresses how minor archives propose practices, languages, and structures that resist hegemonic curatorial standards and management, in order to highlight self-organizing efforts, community archiving practices, and responses to the analog/digital divide.

In conjunction with this event is Crossroads and The Exploding Digital Inevitable with Ross Lipman, taking place the night before on December 12.

GUEST BIO
Juana Suárez is the director of NYU’s Moving Image Archiving and Preservation program. She is a media preservation specialist and a scholar in Latin American cinema; she wrote Sites of Contention: Cultural Production and the Discourse of Violence in Colombia (10) and co-edited of Humor in Latin American Cinema (15). She recently completed the Spanish translation for A Comparative History of Latin American Cinema (20). She is currently forwarding a research project tentatively entitled “Moving Images Archives, Cultural History and The Digital Turn in Latin America.” Suárez is the coordinator of arturita.net, a collaborative digital humanities project on Latin American AV archives.

ABOUT ARCHIVE/COUNTER-ARCHVE
Archive/Counter-Archive is a network of researchers, artists and archivists dedicated to activating and remediating audiovisual archives belonging to women, Indigenous Peoples, the LGBT2Q+ community, and immigrant communities. Political, resistant, and community-based, counter-archives disrupt conventional narratives and enrich our histories. www.counterarchive.ca