Future Issues
Journal Art and Politics of Identity
Call for Proposals
Call for papers for volume 34
Film and archives. Experiences and interventions of the audio/visual memory
Date of publication
January 2026
Deadline for Submission of Proposals
2025, 3 of October
Coordinators
Dra. Ilse Mayté Murillo Tenorio (University Autónoma of Querétaro)
Dr. Samuel Lagunas Cerda (University Autónoma of Querétaro)
Abstract
The objective of this dossier is to offer a comprehensive overview of the diversity of archival intervention experiences and how they work to reconfigure the historicity of film archives and reconstruct regional, community and identity-based audiovisual memories.We consider that a set of efforts to recover, reactivate and reinvent archives has emerged from different fronts and actions, as well as from different disciplines. The practices of conservation, preservation and organization, as well as dissemination and disclosure are just some of the relevant actions to keep archives alive. In this context, the approach of the archival turn is recovered, which suggests a series of theoretical and methodological proposals that propose new ways of linking with the archive.
In other words, these proposals “are aimed not only at reading the sources against the grain, but also at trying to understand the production, organization and conservation of documents as an object of study in its own right” (Sánchez Macedo 2020, n.p.).
In recent years, historians have shown increasing interest in studying not only the information contained in documents, but also the contexts of production that gave rise to them (Sánchez Macedo 2020: 215). But how can we think of a film archive that in many cases is personal or that is guarded by the creators themselves? At first, we will understand film archives as a set of collections and/or collections that safeguard documentary materials of different nature and support that allude to the processes of creation and production of a cinematographic work, as well as materials derived from the processes of promotion, diffusion, exhibition, distribution and dissemination. These may be: film material (physical and digital), photographs, storyboards, scripts, production folders, as well as advertising and exhibition posters, stills, press releases, television program records, interviews, etc.
In a second moment, we consider it pertinent to recover and propose the notion of Unarchiving as a set of actions that imply de-cosifying objects in order to re-activate a different relationship with other objects and subjects. Therefore, de-archiving does not only imply reinventing the forms of organization and intervention of archives, but also de-colonizing and transcending the dimensions of archives in institutional terms. Thus, the archive ceases to be personal and begins to be instituted in a patrimonial sense (Carreño 2021, 15).
Keywords:
Film archives, cinema, audiovisual memories, archivistics, artistic practices.
Some of the lines of research proposed for this issue are the following:
1. Cinematographic creation through archives.
2. Artistic and curatorial practices from archives.
3. Histories and trajectories of film archives.
4. Preservation and conservation processes in audiovisual archiving.
5. Theoretical perspectives on archival science.
6. Archives and virtuality.
7. Strategies and experiences in the dissemination of film archives.
8. Futures of audiovisual archives.
9. Audiovisual archives and affective turn.
