Accidental Archivism: Shaping Cinema's Futures with Remnants of the Past

Abstract

In the digital media ecology, archives are changing. Artists, curators, critics and scholars assume the role of accidental archivists. They shape cinema's futures by salvaging precarious repositories and making them matter in new ways. In the process, the cinema's public, a democratic body seemingly scattered about platforms and niches in a post-pandemic world, re-emerges as a political force. 'Accidental Archivism' brings together programmatic statements and proposals to explore an artistic space between archiving and activism, a space where remnants of the past become the building blocks of new ways of making, showing, teaching and thinking cinema.