Edinburgh Napier University

  (Short Projected Screening and Paper)

The Living Archives is a collaborative research project in which we explore connections between archives, identity and materiality. In participatory workshops with marginalised communities/individuals, we challenge the hierarchy and centrality of institutional archives by inviting participants to recognise the value of personal archival artefacts through an exploratory and creative process of artistic engagement, reflection and participatory curation.

In this paper/presentation, we will analogue-project a short 16mm film (duration 3 minutes) made by a group of young people from the Borders during one of our workshops held in the summer of 2022. Each young person brought an object to the workshop that was significant to their identity. Their object was used as a springboard to explore questions around gender identity, personal archives and materiality. The participants creatively responded to these questions by storyboarding and filming on a Bolex camera, a short experimental film about materiality and time.

The use of 16mm film is significant to our methodology: the cinematic medium serving to capture and archive transient moments. The material filmstrip acts as an archiving tool, whilst also embodying the fragility and imperfections (owing to the chance element involved as light strikes the emulsion and the vagaries of chemical processing) that are inherent to any physical archive. 16mm film is expensive, it encourages an economical creative practice, resisting the impulse for excess commonly found in digital filmmaking. The temporal limitations (each 100 ft film roll only lasts 3 minutes), which we reframe as a structuring device, instils a slow process of 'close-looking' with an emphasis on planning, observation and openness when shooting. The interplay of photochemical film with light and duration lends itself to cine-poetry, and in doing so expands the creative possibilities of archiving.

By creating radical micro moving-image archives, we question the boundaries of what constitutes an archive. We provocatively explore how archives can be a form of activism by empowering individuals to create a sense of belonging whilst decentralising traditional notions of the institutional archive.