Session 8 of Orphans Online, Thursday, May 28, 2020
3:00 pm Euro Migrations 121 minutes.
As with the Great Migrations session before it, Euro Migrations features films documenting migrations within European borders and immigration between Europe to Latin America. Add to this a contemporary state-produced Swedish informational video aimed a migrants and refugees from the Middle East and Africa.
The discussion includes dialogue among the panelists, commenting on each other’s films, concluding with Christian Rossipal’s informal report on activist organizations now using video to address issues facing recent migrants to Europe, e.g., Noncitizen Archive and its parent organization (“a nomadic film and cultural project“): “Noncitizen aims to highlight issues of oppression in our time, like borders, the right to have rights, and restricted freedom of movement.” See also Archive of Migrant Memories in Italy and the Asylum Archive in Ireland.
As it happens, today he published “Unarchive 3: The Undocument” in the journal Diacritics. More about this rich concept in the postscript below.
Four new video essays made for Orphans Online are within the session recording.
Click to enlarge, or view at vimeo.com/431339417 to use time markers.
Euro Migrations
Carolina Cappa (EQZE, San Sebastian, Spain) Project Nitrato Argentino, Museo del Cine Pablo Ducrós Hicken, Buenos Aires. (video essay for debut at Orphans Online, 8 min.)
Kay Hoffmann (U of Offenburg) RhInédits: Amateur Film on the Upper Rhine (video essay, 24 min.)
Anna Leippe (Haus des Dokumentarfilms) Landesfilmsammlung Baden-Württemberg (video essay, 4 min.) and “Schwertmühle” (Karl Gutekunst, Fritz Zoll, and Klaus Hummel, 1967-69) amateur films of housing for displaced persons; silent, 10 min.
Brenda Ibáñez Toledo (Mexico City) The Melzer Home Movies: German Immigrants in Chile, 1940, from Cineteca Nacional de Chile (video essay, 13 min.)
Christian Rossipal (NYU) Swedish Information Video for Asylum Seekers: Medicinsk Åldersbedömning [Age Assessment] (2017). (See his May 26 post, “The Public Procurement of a Biometric Love Story.”)
Discussants Nico de Klerk (U of Utrecht) & Andrea Stultiens (Hanze U of Applied Sciences, Groningen). Their videos and essay address the Dutch “unaffiliated anthropologist-cum-filmmaker/photographer Paul Julien” and his interactions with people across regions in equatorial Africa.
See also this contribution from José Miguel Palacios and Elizabeth Ramírez-Soto, with video excerpts from filmmaker Angelina Vázquez’s Two Years in Finland.
Postscript
The Noncitizen Archive (or library or repository) describes its mission, which well states the issues of orphanhood that archiving and preserving AV material often confront.
About: Noncitizen Archive is a non-profit digital archive for storing images from migrant experiences. It is an independent platform for the secure digital storage of personal and observational footage. We believe videos, photos, and audio material captured by migrants and people living in “noncitizenship” are crucial documents of our time, but that they often get lost. Footage is deleted and mobile phones go missing. Through Noncitizen Archive, we want to save this material for the future, whether it’s for personal use, research and/or cultural projects.
Noncitizen Archive stores footage belonging to migrants, asylum seekers, refugees, activists, aid workers, filmmakers and journalists. The photographer/ filmmaker always owns the copyright of the images. Those who upload material to the archive can choose if their content is open to the public, available to Noncitizen Archive users only, or private. Users can remove their content from the archive if they wish.
Noncitizen Archive contains audio-visual material with an alternative perspective on migratory experiences to that which is often preserved. What the videos, photos, or audio files contain is up to the creators/ users. It can be mobile phone videos from journeys, photos of family members and friends, audio/ video diaries, etc.
In “Unarchive 3: The Undocument” Rossipal writes:
Rather than replicating the structure of a state archive—in which administration is a central aspect of record-keeping—vernacular archives, collections, and repositories organized by migrants and refugees seem to hold the potential for something radically different. Admittedly, projects like those mentioned above tend to, by necessity, set up frameworks that regulate and control the conditions of emergence of statement-events, to [reference] Foucault. In this regard we might still be talking about archives, even if they are “counter-archives” or “archives of counter-documents.”
The persistence of these terms that grapple with the meanings of “archive” and seek alternate, better, and emancipatory ways to use noncommercial content is notable. The orphan metaphor and the dynamics of Orphan Film Symposium events incorporate a wide variety of approaches. To be sure the establishment archives, state affiliated and otherwise, participate, sharing space with small, independent, private, marginal, unconventional, outsider, and oppositional organizations. Yet it is also clear that work with orphan works simultaneously summons distinctive language.
During this 2020 Orphan Film Symposium, we heard about similar conceptions of an “unarchive” and “undocument.” For the Center for Urban History in Lviv, Ukraine, its Urban Media Archive of video, images, maps, and oral histories embraces [dearchiwizacja], a program of “[Unarchiving]” (discussed here). In describing her creative work with archival material, filmmaker Ja’Tovia Gary used the term “counter-archive” and as it happened a few minutes later Matt Soar and Monika Kin Gagnon of Concordia University Montreal announced nothing less than the fact that Orphans 2022 will be in Montreal and devoted to the concept of Counter-archive. The project uses the telling URL: counterarchive.ca.
The ambitious, rigorous, and important project is described this way.
Archive/Counter-Archive: Activating Canada’s Moving Images Heritage is a six-year SSHRC Partnership Grant dedicated to researching and remediating audiovisual archives created by women, Indigenous Peoples, the LGBTQ2+ community and immigrant communities. Political, resistant, and community-based, counter-archives disrupt conventional narratives and enrich our histories. The project’s research is committed to finding solutions for safekeeping Canada’s audiovisual heritage. We seek to research and remediate audiovisual heritage that is most vulnerable to disappearance and inaccessibility, fostering a community and network dedicated to creating best practices and cultural policies.
The NYU-Concordia symposium will be international in perspective but use the A/CA mission and goals as guiding principles.