CFP :  Living Archives and Counter-Archives in Film, Video, and Media Arts in Canada (SCMS 2023)

Archive/Counter-Archive Call for Papers for SCMS 2023

 Living Archives and Counter-Archives in Film, Video, and Media Arts in Canada

Archives are generally associated with things that are dead and static, but digital media are impacting the very meaning and location of archives along with the production of more dynamic and diverse histories. Since the archival turn in the early 1990s (generally attributed to the rise of the internet and the expansion of local area networks globally), artists and digital humanists, often working in collaboration with archivists, have been at the forefront of developing new ways to animate and create archives both public and private. Artists are using film and media archives to disrupt traditional forms of history, collection, and national narrative. New approaches to celluloid, video, and digital media are process-oriented, participatory, and performative. Archives used in this way foster new living ecologies of entanglement that are generating more complex epistemological models of memory and place.

Archive/Counter-Archive: Activating Canada’s Audiovisual Heritage is a SSHRC Partnership Grant research-creation project dedicated to activating and remediating audiovisual archives created by Indigenous Peoples (First Nations, Métis, Inuit), the Black community and People of Colour, women, LGBT2Q+ and immigrant communities. Political, resistant, and community-based, counter-archives disrupt conventional narratives and enrich our histories. For the purposes of this project, we have defined counter-archives as political, ingenious, resistant, and community-based. They are embodied differently and have explicit intention to historicize differently, to disrupt conventional national narratives, and to write difference into public accounts. They seek to counter the hegemony of traditional archival institutions that have normally neglected or marginalized women, Indigenous, Inuit and Métis Peoples, the LGBT2Q+ community, and Black, racialized, and immigrant communities. This panel invites presentations on research and research-creation related to the themes and approaches of Archive/Counter-Archive.

Keywords: archives and counter-archives; archival film, video, and media; community media; media by women, Indigenous, Inuit and Métis Peoples, the Black community and People of Colour, the LGBT2Q+ community, and immigrant communities.

Please send proposals to Andrew Bailey (kmo@counterarchive.ca) by August 8th. In your proposal, please include your name, a short bio (50 words), submission title, a short abstract  (250-350 words), keywords (3-5) and bibliographic references (2-5).