ARCHIVAL POLITICS: an online conversation for multimodal anthropologists, June 13, 7pm ET via Zoom

[Stephanie Sadre-Orafai]

Join the Collective for Multimodal Makers, Publishers, Collaborators, and Teachers (COMMPCT), a new initiative of the Society for Visual Anthropology, for our third virtual event, an online conversation for multimodal anthropologists interested in reimagining ethnography through audio-visual archives! 

5pm Mexico City  (June 13) | 7pm New York (June 13) | 9am Melbourne (June 14)

What are the possibilities and limitations of using archives in audiovisual and artistic projects? How can ethnographers and artists collaborate to imagine new lives for archives? 

As decades of collaborative and intercultural work have shown, state and institutional archives are mired in colonial structures and deeply entrenched inequities that have historically disempowered and dispossessed indigenous peoples and other communities. Filmmakers, artists, and anthropologists, however, have worked to reimagine, reclaim and deploy archives in more expansive ways, emphasizing collective rights to access, intervene and recreate documents, photographs, films, objects, and other media in creative and powerful ways.

In ARCHIVAL POLITICS, two collectives of young indigenous women from Mexico and Australia will share how they use archival materials in their audiovisual production and artistic practices. Rosalba López López  (Mazahua), Sashenka Hernández Estrada (P'urhépecha) and Orión Marín of Sembradoras Audiovisuales will be in conversation with Maya Hodge (Lardil) and Kate ten Buuren (Taungurung) to discuss how they view the relationship between their mediamaking, archival sources, and the work they perform in transmitting knowledge to the next generation, as well as imagining new narratives and stories. Anthropologists Gabriela Zamorano (CIESAS Ciudad de México), Sabra Thorner (Mount Holyoke College), and Sandra Rozental (El Colegio de México) will guide the conversation. 

Register here: http://tinyurl.com/COMMPCTArchives

CoMMPCT was founded in 2023 by Nat Nesvaderani, Stephanie Sadre-Orafai, Emiko Stock, and Gabriela Zamorano Villarreal. CoMMPCT is committed to creating spaces to discuss less visible elements of making, publishing, collaborating, and teaching visual and multimodal anthropologies and collecting shared wisdom and experiences in an online curated repository. CoMMPCT coordinates tri-annual, thematic virtual events and publishes accompanying curated resources. These events and collections leverage other Society for Visual Anthropology initiatives, like the Visual Research Conference, Film and Media Festival, Visual Anthropology Review, and AAA Annual Meeting program, amplifying their reach. Click here to join our list-serv!