Living Archive – Archive work as a contemporary artistic and curatorial practice, posits the film archive as a place of participation and production. Everyone encountering the archive becomes an archivist on their own terms, changes the archive, produces it anew. Curators, filmmakers, artists, scholars and other researchers bring their different perspectives, knowledges, queries and urgencies towards more than 10.000 film copies that cut across histories and presents of independent and political world cinema, hosted by the Arsenal film archive.
Many of the films were part of and are now seen as markers of historical moments of radical transformation. They are aligned with desires for liberations, independencies, resistances, revolutionary processes-politically and aesthetically. Any process of bringing these films (back) into the public realm is thus faced with questions of legacies, with what constitutes cultural heritage, with how we can re-allign ourselves with their past potentials and ambivalences, with how they gain new liveness in our continuing present. The archivist’s desire towards documents of the past might thus make her into an archivist for the imaginaries of the future.
Following this line of inquiry three films, out of two Living Archive projects, have been selected for Experimenta 2017. They each propose a powerful role for cinema in precarious times, albeit in different ways and not unchallenged, by decisively experimenting with the spaces of the possible that cinematic practice affords.

Living Archive – Archive work as a contemporary artistic and curatorial practice was a project of Arsenal. Institute for film and video art (Berlin) that took place between 2011 and 2013, with 38 participants. The selected films were part of projects by participants Tobias Hering (project: Spectres of Freedom) and the collective Entuziazm (Michael Baute, Volker Pantenburg, Stefan Pethke, Stefanie Schlüter; project: The Business Year 1978). The Living Archive ethos towards archival practice has since continued in a series of projects that followed, such as the Living Archive Residency, the Animated Archive, the Visionary Archive,
Asynchron, a project with the Nigerian Film Corporation and the currently running Archive ausser sich, part of The Language of Things, project by House of World Cultures.

opening and closing film program for Experimenta India, Bangalore 2017

https://research.gold.ac.uk/id/eprint/24384