Archive/Counter-Archive
Archive/Counter-Archive: Activating Canada’s Moving Image Heritage is a research-creation partnership led by Janine Marchessault involving over twenty archival organizations and cultural repositories for AV and other media in Canada. This project focuses on the challenges and generative opportunities afforded by diverse media archives belonging to Indigenous peoples (First Nations, Métis, Inuit), Black communities, people of color, women, LGBT2Q+, and immigrant communities. Through artist residencies and creative counter-archives, the project calls attention to archives most vulnerable to disappearance and inaccessibility and hopes to foster a network dedicated to sharing resources and developing creative methodologies for a new generation of artists, curators, archivists, scholars and activists. Janine Marchessault will discuss the project and artistic inspirations leading up to it.
Janine Marchessault is a Professor of Cinema and Media Arts at York University, where she was the Canada Research Chair in Art, Digital Media, and Globalization (2003-2013). Dr. Marchessault is the author of ten monographs and edited volumes, and over fifty articles in books, journals, and catalogues devoted to cinema, new media, and contemporary art. She is a past President of the Film Studies Association of Canada and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. Her recent monograph is Ecstatic Worlds: Media, Utopias, Ecologies (2017 MIT Press) and her monograph in preparation is Archival Imaginary: Expanded Memory. She is the Principal Investigator of Archive/Counter-Archive.
Our lecture series is made possible by generous support from the MacArthur Foundation, Ford Foundation, and MIT Transmedia Storytelling Initiative.
