Three Videos, One Archive
[1]The Perverted Archival Image workshop centered on and tentacled off from Studio Baalbeck. The workshop participants created an audio montage of recordings to accompany some of the visual archive material and constructed a lexicon as a tool in attempting to make legible the unknowns of the Studio Baalbeck Archive.
Peter Hort, Sarah Messerschmidt: Fragments and Annotations
Alexis Guillier: Trailer for “Purgatoire” (“Cinema that kills”)
Rita Mounzer: Diary Entry No.168.
All archival material used in this workshop are part of the Baalbeck Studios collection and were kindly made available by UMAM D&R and digitized by Arsenal—Institute for Film and Video Art.
This contribution is published in the framework of the Whole Life Academy as part of the workshop “The Perverted Archival Image”.
- This contribution is published as the workshop findings of “The Perverted Archival Image”. The workshop was convened by Ayman Nahle and Siska and took place online from October 2021 – March 2022 as part of the Whole Life Academy Berlin. ↑
Connected Material
Schaber’s contribution revisits her 2004 work culture is our business and considers the complex issues around these three agencies. At stake in these differences are how the image’s story should be told, and how this telling is embedded in the viewing and understanding of history.
Paula Montesios und Eduardo Molinari speak about their artistic practices and how they are related to archives. Together they reflect about counter-archiving, para-archiving and un-archiving and how this includes experiences with and appearances of sensorial encounters with the past.
An aural and visual essay that overlays several journeys, a sensory one that attempts to evoke a perceived time, place or geography through the mapping of territories, and a narrative one materialized as a speculative epistolary correspondence between the present and the future that continuously summons the past.
Archives are often perceived as somewhat static. They look back, they conserve, they remember. But the thinking that was present in the pieces of the Pinkus Archive all addressed ecology, extinction, and political agency in ways that not only extend into our present, but into our future.
Chto Delat’s installation Canary Archives employs the imagery of the canary in the coal mine, once used to alarm miners when carbon monoxide levels rose. Where is the canary today, that tells us wether the danger is real? It seems to have gone silent, the sharpest signal it can send. In an emergency newspaper issue under the impression of the Russian war on Ukraine, Chto Delat assembles anti-war views of artists and critics and expresses their solidarity with the Ukrainian people.
A conversation about KANG Sang-woo’s film KIM-GUN and how it treats historical evidence and testimonies as a ‘horizon of contingent truths’ with the potential to be pieced together in alternating ways, touching upon the complex dynamics of archives and life stories, collective memory and amnesia, the mechanisms of image-making and history-writing.
The legacy of anti-colonial leader and Pan-Africanist revolutionary Amílcar Cabral (1924-1973) still calls for cultural readings, and not strictly political ones. Contemporary art, so-called “artistic research” and critical theory will benefit from a cross-disciplinary approach which puts Cabral as relevant to art or which turns Cabral’s many contributions into tools.
Three videos are used in real time composition to explore the combination of the moving images – the edited sequence creates a non-existing-place.
The video explores the encounter (digital and analogue) between the body and the archive.
These images were taken in the frame of The Whole Life Academy. Laura Fiorio accompanied the project as a photographer from the beginning in 2019 and developed her own approach of documenting archival sites and methods.