Archives-in-the-Making, Vulnerable Communities and Migration: Outreach and Innovative Scholarship in Audiovisual-Based Research Projects and Associations
Authors: Matteo Al Kalak, Gianluca Gatta
This edition of (Dis)Agreements is the product of our own experience with the conceptualisation, organisation, and development of an online open archive that compiles and shares a collection of films, videos, and other documents related to migration and mobility across the Atlantic. In short, we have brought together researchers to talk about the work being done in the following initiatives: Archive/Counter-Archive: Activating Moving Image Heritage (2018-2024 SSHRC Partnership Grant), a Canadian research project involving more than 17 community- and artist-run organizations in Canada dedicated to compiling diverse narratives of Indigenous, LGBTQ, immigrant and women’s histories; the Archivio delle memorie migranti/Archive of migrant memories (AMM), an Italian association that collects, disseminates and produces audiovisual material on migration based on participatory methods; ITHACA. Interconnecting Histories and Archives for Migrant Agency, a European research project focusing on narratives of migration that aims to produce a “Superarchive” containing experiences on migration; the Make Film History5project, a British initiative that fosters the creative reuse of archival material; and finally, the Reel Borders project, a Belgian-based project funded by the EU that looks at the ways cinema has imagined and represented borders. This heterogeneous group of research programs speaks in multiple ways about the diverse interests, topics and strategies pursued to analyse and audiovisually archive human displacement.
