Wrap-Up Panel with Organizers, Keynote Speakers, and Advisors

Duration: 01:14:17; Aspect Ratio: 1.818:1; Hue: 42.310; Saturation: 0.056; Lightness: 0.231; Volume: 0.122; Cuts per Minute: 0.242; Words per Minute: 141.768

Index of the Disappeared (Mariam Ghani + Chitra Ganesh)

Chitra Ganesh + Mariam Ghani have collaborated since 2004 on the project Index of the Disappeared, which is both a physical archive of post-9/11 disappearances and a mobile platform for public dialogue. As an archive, the Index traces the difficult histories of immigrant, other and dissenting communities in the US since 9/11, and the ways in which censorship of speech and data blackouts create real absences in real lives, by collecting and connecting documents and testimony. As a platform, the Index presents discussions on ideas and issues related to the materials it archives (and some on archiving itself, like this conference), and stages interventions that translate those materials into visual elements installed in a range of physical and virtual spaces - including galleries, museums, universities, community centers, libraries, conferences, magazines, books, windows, the street, the web and the mail. Recent Index projects include a web project commissioned by Creative Time Reports; a print project for the 30th anniversary issue of the Radical History Review; a parasitic library-within-a-library in the downtown Buffalo public library; a site-specific installation of Index documents related to military codes of conduct at the Park Avenue Armory for the exhibition Democracy in America; and a multilingual window installation at Exit Art with texts drawn from the archive in large-scale neon and vinyl. Ganesh and Ghani are the 2013-14 artists in residence at the Asian/Pacific/American institute at NYU. As part of their residency, Index of the Disappeared is currently presenting the window installation Watch This Space at the Kimmel Center (Washington Square South and LaGuardia Place) and the library installation Parasitic Archive at the Kevorkian Center (Washington Square South and Sullivan Street). Details, documentation and updates on the Index can be found at kabul-reconstructions.net/disappeared.

Mona Jimenez

Mona Jimenez started transferring obsolete videotapes in the late 1980s and has been an advocate and organizer for the preservation of independent media ever since. She is Associate Arts Professor/Associate Director in NYU’s Moving Image Archiving and Preservation Program, where she teaches collection management and the preservation of video and digital works. Since 2009 she has been experimenting with participatory models of media/film archiving locally and through Community Archiving Workshops organized by the Independent Media Committee of the Association of Moving Image Archivists. She is the founder of Audiovisual Preservation Exchange (APEX), a project to network audiovisual archivists, educators and students internationally through shared work on collections. She is co-editor with Sherry Miller Hocking and Kathy High of The Emergence of Video Processing Tools: Television Becoming Unglued.

Jack (John Kuo Wei) Tchen

Jack Tchen is a facilitator, teacher, historian, and curator. An associate professor at New York University, he is founding director of the Asian/Pacific/American Studies Program and Institute at New York University and co-founder of the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis. He is also co-founder and senior historian at the Museum of Chinese in America. Tchen is the co-editor of the recently published Yellow Peril!: An Archive of Anti-Asian Fear, a comprehensive repository of anti-Asian images and writings. He is also the author of the award-winning books New York before Chinatown: Orientalism and the Shaping of American Culture, 1776-1882 and Genthe's Photographs of San Francisco's Old Chinatown, 1895-1905. Awards include the Charles S. Frankel Prize from the National Endowment for the Humanities (renamed The National Medal of Humanities).

Mariam Ghani and Chitra Ganesh, Introduction, Wrap-up Panel

Good evening, everybody.

Thank you so much for coming to the conference and participating with your enthusiasm and intention.

And we are here tonight to share some closing thoughts and also speak in a little bit more depth with Shaina Anand and Lara Baladi about their projects as we were not able to have a full Q&A session for them.

So I'm mostly going to be facilitating this. I hope that this is an opportunity for you all to raise any kinds of questions, connections, points of intersection that you've observed or been excited about during the course of the conference.

And I will also now turn it over to the fantastic group of wrap-up folks. I just want to say, if you have lingering questions for Anne as well, because that was a fairly short Q&A, you should feel free to follow those.

Yeah, actually for everybody.

For any and all of us. Any questions at all, really, we're here to help.

Yes, and any questions that we might ask. We're your advice panel. Archive advice.

You can tell us the end of the conference.

You can tell we're getting a little punchy.

I'm thinking of anxiety.

Can I start? Please, please. Okay.

Discussion with Shaina Anand, Lara Baladi, Ann Cvetkovich, Chitra Ganesh, Mariam Ghani, Mona Jimenez, and John Kuo Wei Tchen

I'm not going to start on anything serious. I just, it's very serious, actually. I want to thank Mariam and Chitra and Amita. Why Amita is not here, I don't know.

She's sleeping.

She's getting to get up on Chitra.

Because I think it's a very, and I thought it was lovely that you mentioned it this morning.

It's an incredibly generous gesture that they've done by putting together this conference and bringing together so many different people, although there's always more people that could come in and there's always, you know, different ways of doing things.

I think this has been quite extraordinarily rich in many ways. I wish also there was only one room so we could attend all the talks instead of having to choose, so that was quite painful.

But thank Twitter, we could follow almost both of them simultaneously, so that was good.

That's it, and I want to thank you for coming and for, you know, it's been two days where we've made some connections and met, people have met, and I've watched people sort of coming in and out, and it's been really nice.

So thank you, everyone.

Okay.

Wow, I don't even know where to begin, really.

I also just want to... Mariam has been live-tweeting her thoughts on this conference for the entirety of its duration, so you can also look at her thoughts there. You can actually see almost everything I've thought during this entire conference on Twitter, except for those brief moments when the wireless stopped working.

I also was really struck by what Jack said during this welcome about this idea of a radical critical generosity, and I think that really has been a guiding principle for us in trying to organize this conference.

I know we spoke about this when we were putting the conference together that we put out this call for proposals, and then we were so surprised by the overwhelming response that we received. It was just astonishing.

There were 160 responses to this call for proposals, and some of them, many of them, were actually full panels and full screenings, like the one going on next door, that were proposed to us, and so many of them, so many more than we could put into this conference were astonishingly good and really rich, and what they presented to us was a picture of what could be contained in the term radical archive that was just really broad and diverse and so many different ideas of what could possibly constitute a radical archive, and that's why we then, I really do apologize for this, Jack, we then said, we need to double the size of the conference, and then we doubled the size of the conference, hence the two rooms, because we felt that if we tried to reduce it down to half the size of what you actually saw here, we would be leaving out so many of these possible definitions or possible imaginations of what could constitute a radical archive, and that would be really unfortunate, and we didn't want to do that, we didn't want to narrow it down too much, so I hope that what we've done is to be critical enough and generous enough at the same time that we have done justice to what can happen when you put the word archive and the word radical together, and what can be imagined through the joining of those two terms.

I feel like I should talk now before all thoughts just completely leave my head.

But yeah, thank you, that's helpful, since I realize sitting here part of me wants to actually ask the two of you questions, but if you've tweeted, I can just go read the tweets, and maybe you do need to sleep on it, but just even hearing a little bit of the backstory is really helpful, and particularly because one of the things I was trying to underscore in my remarks this morning, but I would love to hear your thoughts about it, was perhaps how the artist piece fits into this notion of critical generosity that you've just mentioned, so I'd love to hear any thoughts you might have about sort of where we are with that at the end of the day.

And then I also want to pick up on what you just said about the doubling of the size or trying to leave as many different meanings of radical archives in place as possible.

That's also worth pausing over, I think, at least for me, because it reminds me to check a little bit my desire or tendency to in that constellation mode that also came up for me this morning to try to connect all the dots.

And for example, in my effort to think about queering and decolonizing the archive at the same time, there's for me been these little murmurs that have come up. Jack and I were talking about this out in the lobby earlier about how do indigenous frameworks and diasporic frameworks merge together? Where are they different? Where is it the case that we need to just allow for the radical specificity and materiality of particular archives and not try to make lesbian herstory archives, Padma, Egyptian revolution all kind of connect together? Like, I like to do that, but maybe that's also, I was even thinking its own kind of globalizing or imperializing gesture.

So that's also something that I would love to get a little bit of wrap up on here.

I was actually going to say that I don't know if everybody knows, but they brought people together for, like, I don't know what we call it, focus, working group to flesh out some of the ideas.

And so I would actually, in your answer, love to hear about how, what you, what came out strongly for you from the working group and how that might have intersected with the, what actually, the proposals and that you ended up with your themes.

Well, there's, there's two things. So I'm going to say a couple of things and then I, I also wanted to have the, the second, I'll let the proposition again, because in Twitter, apparently, there was desire to speak further about the, about the archive not being a site of redemption which is very much related to what we're talking about and then we can use that in this.

But just very briefly to answer some of these questions, for me, I think that the, the way the conception, the inception of this comes in a lot of ways mirrors the inception over the last 10 years emerged in a, somewhat of an organic way in that we came together on an intersection of issues at that point in 2004 around the Republican post-9 hours was the beginning of a trajectory that sadly we had no idea would still be so relevant 10 years later, but it was, We really didn't think we'd still have to be doing this.

but it's, it's there. So I think that that sense of this organic confluence of topics, the need for discourse around how we're there. So I think that's, that's already out there. Um, and the second thing, uh, well the role of the working group is an interesting question.

Um, so we convened a group of all the people at NYU who work on archives, um, either as archivists or, um, as, uh, theorists or scholars who deal with archives in different ways, who think about archives in different ways.

Um, and then also people from around the city, um, from other institutions, um, who are also, um, working with archives in different ways. And we had this kind of like, four, like 30, 30, 30 person, I think, working group meeting.

Um, and that's actually really, that was very formative in, um, putting together the call for proposals. And I think it's one of the reasons why the call for proposals received such, um, a strong response.

Because, um, we, we wrote the call for proposals based on what we heard in that meeting.

So it was based on what, uh, this pretty diverse group of people told us they were interested in talking about. And, and from the, from the get-go, the collective generation of these ideas happened by the coming together of practitioners and theorists, and also theorists who are or have been practitioners.

So I think that's part of what makes it exciting, is that, uh, that, that convergence, um, is there, and was actually evident in so many of the, of the presentations.

So, yeah, um, yeah. I had a thought that I thought I should just throw forth, and then I'll come to the archive is not a scene of redemption. I was talking to in the break, and it made me think of something Ashok, who is also co-founder of camp and co-founding member of, of, of, of, Padma has often said, which is that art is not a subset of culture.

And our relationship with law and ethics in the archive could be seen in much the similar way, right? Ethics is not a subset of law. Ethics actually begins where law ends. And it's, it's this challenging space which the archive inhabits, and something we have to constantly be, be thinking through.

It is an experimental space.

Uh, uh, there are no givens, but there is, there is, there is this act and this intent of doing. And with it then comes, of course, the shared dilemmas, responsibilities. But without doing that, you, you won't, you won't get there.

You won't be able to really, really trouble the idea of the archive and the idea of, uh, what, what really is possible.

Um, one moment of recognition that, that, that, that has to happen is that it is impossible for any archive to legally own everything they possess, right? And so fundamentally, or, you know, or collect, or distribute.

It's impossible, right? And we know this. We know this from any collection, any archive. There would be no Cinémathèque Francais. There would be no National Film Archive in there, you know, if someone hadn't been a pirate, right? This, this is something we, we, we cannot forget.

All archives are pirate archives. The point is what is to be done and what can be done. Um, so Padma, for example, is not a pirate archive, right? All footage there is, in some ways, uh, contributed by whoever, for that moment, is the custodian or the owner of, of that image.

At the same time, Padma's primary collaborations are grounded in the ethic of piracy. And I think this is really important because you need to, you need to realize that you don't own any of this. Um, so why be proprietary about it? And maybe we need to totally, like, rethink of why we collected the archive.

What's it there for? And if we answer that in the simple, generous ways like we do, it's to build the culture, to build culture commons, to build, you know, an ecology of knowledge, so on and so forth, we'll need to address this with some urgency in 2014, right? What would this mean? Uh, in terms of access, accessibility, criticality, you know, where, how, and, and, and one really has to, has to think about this public access in this moment of being digital.

And one has to think of autonomous spaces on the internet. I mean, it's, it's totally captured. Does anybody, anybody go to YouTube anymore? You need to log in with your account. Ads are being fed to you.

I mean, where are the third spaces? You know, we, I remember, I mean, I'm digressing a bit, but Ashok and me were taking note of the fact that the internet has disappeared from art practice. I think Kabul are, the playlist from Padma that was screaming, streaming the Afghan films archive was the only internet project in Documenta this year.

And that too on the fringes of it. But I think 2002, was that the history? Yeah, 2002, 10 years before, had a lot more radical internet archives, right? So how are we not challenging this, this still somewhat free and open space, right? To formally reinvent things, reinvent the possibilities of the internet.

This, to come back to, to, to, to, to, the conversation I was having with Jaufey.

Because we've been inhabiting the space where hackers, coders, artists, activists, and filmmakers ended up like quite audaciously saying, we are archivists. And this is the sixth year running that we're constantly engaging and constantly rethinking, both in the conceptual discursive space, but also in actual material space, where, which is often fraught and fragile.

What do you do with, with material? How do you, you care for it? And so on. We're at an interesting point where there are quite large collaborations looking up, looking down at us. You know, with large institutional archives, collaborations with the state.

But Mah's sister archive is a totally pirate archive called IndianCine.Ma, which is the encyclopedia of Indian cinema. It has 36,000 plus entries. And it's been populated with films, with film scholarship.

It's, it's using the same. I mean, I don't want to get into the technical stuff, but a kind of new way to even be doing film studies.

We're speaking to the music and dance archive, the National Film Archive of India. And somehow they're all ready to make the shift, right? Of putting things in the public domain. But they always speak about question of rights, and the question of, you know, how do we get these, all this legally signed off by like, you know, 26,000 Indian artists? Or like, they're dead and gone, but.

And I think, I think here we need to, we need to just shift things, you know? We really need to put everything out there with a really generous framework that says, now this is a public archive, or whatever.

Indian dance, Indian culture, Asia Art Archive, Khoj Archive. These are what we're working with right now.

And yeah, and then say, it's out there. If you don't want to be part of it, we will take you down. But to do, you know, to make this gesture at the beginning, I think is what really needs to be done.

No, absolutely. And there were, there were a few things that Shaina said, and also that I felt kept coming up during the conference. So one of them that I heard was the idea of, speaking with, as opposed to speaking for.

Another thing was the idea of archiving information that was ever secret, or partially secret, or partially putting people in danger, or partial knowledge. Also the idea of the archive as a place of safety, which I thought was interesting.

The safe space, the security, in an era of security and surveillance.

And also the fleshing out of the affective relationship to an archive, which includes generosity, earnestness, a lot of, a lot of different kinds of more developed ways of thinking about the emotional resonance of working with some of this material.

And intellectual propriety versus intellectual property, I think is also, that ethical compass and the ethical turn is also part of the affect.

So the point about the archive not being a scene of redemption, I think this one comes out of, for me personally, a lot of personal anxiety and personal pain and growth.

When I started filming, or rather assisting a director, I think this was 1997, and we traveled through India, all by road for six months.

And I was assistant director to a filmmaker who still remains my mentor in many ways, Saeed Mirza. But I was totally struck and traumatized by the way we were filming. And to my 18-year-old head at that point, I was like, hey, wait a minute, if we're post-colonial and we're post-feminist at this moment, why are we deploying the same gaze? And it's not a question of the same technology, but really the same gaze.

And I began to think about this. And then as the years passed, and if you were an independent filmmaker, you often got your funding in the late 90s, early 2000, from Dutch funders and from these development kind of NGOs.

And they always came with this development agenda, right? India is still a developing nation. So my proposal had to still be about that slum there, and the issues of that cultural safari. Yeah, exactly.

Or people. Sorry. They're called cultural safaris. We suffer from the same thing in India.

Yeah. But what do you end up doing then? What do filmmakers do? They kind of, you regurgitate the same image.

And this is what I mean. Like this whole, can the subaltern speak? Can the native informant tell me about their own fucked up condition and their own trauma yet again, but in their own voice? I mean, we understand where all this is coming from.

But as filmmakers, as artists, one really has to disturb this thing. And I think that was what I was trying to say by reading out thesis number four, which is, you know, why do we need to remember all history as that of bare life condition and states of exception? When we went to Palestine, we were like, and wanting to make the film, I think the question we asked was, should I be the 1457th filmmaker who wants to make this film on Palestine because they feel for the Palestinian cause? Or what? Or what? And then if you stay with the trouble and say, yes, I want to be the 1457 filmmaker, then what are you going to do? Because they've already, you know, they live in that permanent state of exception.

And that victimhood has now been ingrained. So you turn on a camera and you will hear that lament of pain again and again and again. Now, how do you make this relationship with that subject interesting, somewhat transformative or liberating for them? You know, can this filmmaking process change? I think these are our core questions.

One is to ask more for image making. And that's what we meant, that in the archive, these things are not going to be redeemed just because the 250 hours of shared footage of the Gujarat went in. That's our knowledge production in the archive also.

I think the or what question is the...

If any of you have a meeting with...

No, then go ahead.

Or...

I just want to say one thing.

Sorry about this question. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Not to take time from this phenomenal panel. No. I'm totally in love with this panel. Feel free to type up any time. Yeah. But I just, I'm totally caveling over the panel and getting to be here. But for...

So I'm thinking, when I heard you say that, I immediately thought about the different ways that the Snowden revelations on the WikiLeaks stuff have and haven't had an effect.

And I mean, it's a completely different thing that you're talking about, but it is a similar... Like, I have an inclination to really want the archive to be a place where we can turn to to hold people accountable for their abuses of power.

But in a lot of ways, it's a false hope because you can reveal the most incredible violations and nothing happens. So it spoke to me on a bunch of different models.

I don't know if that's related to archives or to the world we live in. I mean, do you think it's related to archives? I think it's related to archives because what did the leaks do? They made visible, really dark archives.

And then I guess your point that this did, you know... We heard this so many times when the first WikiLeaks happened, like, oh yes, but I know what America did in Iraq. So what does the leaks tell me? I mean, there's devil in every detail.

But this is a question to all of us. When data leaks in such a massive amount, but such an amazing kind of data leak, which is a rupture in a top-down system of information, when the Snowden leaks happen, why aren't we looking at them? Why aren't we creating interesting parsable databases? Why aren't we studying them? And why aren't we as artists, activists, and theorists asking, how do you feel that leak? And how can we feel the knowledge that the information could provide us? Well, there are artists working on that.

We have actually done work on that.

There's actually a bunch of artists who are involved with The Intercept, the new journalistic endeavor. Like, there's two artists who were intimately in the new...

The new journalistic endeavor that was directly inspired by the Snowden leaks, which Glenn Greenwald and...

Laura Poitras and Jeremy Scahill and a bunch of really amazing people are involved with it. But, like, Trevor Paglin is also involved with it. And, yeah, I mean, Creative Time Reports is working with them.

Creative Time Reports, who are podcasting this conference. So there are more intimate links than you might imagine. But I actually wanted to talk to Lara about this, because one of the things in your talk that I think we need to bring into this is the idea that there are contexts in which the archive becomes...

Contexts and moments in which the archive becomes the last site of possible resistance and the last place where the revolution is still happening.

Lara. Lara the last places where it's still possible or where its possibility, you know, remains to be revived in some later moments.

So how does that... How does that jive with the idea that the archive isn't a site of redemption? I was just going to say, very quickly, it also... What you both... All of you are talking about also reminded me of what...

of Hannah Sleeman's talk, which was on the PLO archives. And just this idea of...

We... Many of us who are interested in creating some kind of alternative narrative or counter-history are interested in reading things very much against the grain. And she... Her talk was about the possibility and the value of reading something for its grain, depending on the institution that either appropriates or captures the archival materials and the kind of larger meta-narrative they want to make with it.

So actually in the case of her archives, reading it for the grain is the... is the resistive act. Because those were read by the Israeli army to create a certain kind of narrative. And also the Palestinian Authority later...

Yeah, later on. Yeah. When the creator became the captor, which was such like an incredibly poetic and lovely way of talking about it.

I do think the non-redemptive nature of the archive was covered quite well in some of the sessions that I heard. So the one... The black box session where I... where there was some discussion about the limits of investigative journalism.

And then also the panel this afternoon. Anne McClintock's talk, for example, about ghosting and the tremendous invisibility of the work of surveillance in the US. So we have that and I'm also struck by the comment about post 9-11 culture and...

Because that's one connection I have with the two of you.

And my efforts to produce a more nuanced history of pre, during and post 9-11. Like I am sad that we still are having to think in that frame this many years later. Particularly because at the time I thought this is...

This is not just trauma and catastrophe. This is business as usual. Like there's nothing that's happened here that we don't already know. And then I grudgingly had to admit that in fact different kinds of apparatuses have been put into place.

Or around the question of revolution. Having the patience for the ongoingness of revolution is for me part of the work of archiving the ordinary. Alongside of archiving the spectacular. And so that also gives me a kind of patience with what the archive does and does not say.

And I feel like again across these two days it's been very rich with insight around that. So even the reminder against redemption for me also is somehow kind of reassuring. About messiness and ongoingness and the ways in which violence is ongoing.

And that's a story that we are continuing to need to find ways to say and re-say.

I mean you already said it in a very nice way. But my sense was that ultimately with all the talks that we heard.

And coming from such different directions.

And with very different subjects. Whether it's also people using archives.

Or building archives. Or trying to structure them technically even.

The sense of there's a few things that for me came out which was the necessity for access.

And access that's not just about facilitating the access to people.

But also the problematics of the access. And therefore the power. And who has the power over the information contained in the access. So this was part of the talk on the drones.

Also what was interesting for me. And also here I'm talking from my perspective. Is that I'm in a country which is extremely poor.

Extremely extremely poor. And that is now has 90 million people.

Not very many have access to internet in fact.

But although the revolution was very much on the ground. A big part of it was communicated through internet. And we made it an international event. Not a local one. And I think that's a very interesting part of 21st century history.

We cannot talk about places or groups.

Or minorities or majorities.

As geographically located.

Or contained within limitations. I think we need to think of things as in a very different way.

And that's my sense also with hearing about archives today.

Sorry.

The internet.

And the fact that the revolution was covered essentially digitally.

Is also very interesting. Because a lot of the talks here during the last two days. Were very much about the problematics of bringing archives that exist. That are mainly physical.

Into the internet.

And so the questions that people have here. Are almost opposite to the. Not opposite. But very different than the questions we have. And that I've brought.

I hope clearly in my talk.

Which is.

You know.

The problematics are the same. In a certain way. How do we navigate through the archives? How do we access them? How do we make connections between archives? How do we digitalize the archives or not? We have a different problematic.

And we have different technicalities to solve. As well as intellectual questions regarding selection. And who gets to put what in the archives.

So I think what would be interesting. Is to find the common ground. And where do we overlap. In this weird inverted world. Where my poor country has this. Has jumped a generation. And has access to sort of.

You know.

Technological digital world.

And ultimately the last thing I want to say. Is also what I'm hearing. And what I think you just said. Was very much that.

We all here at least.

In some way. Are using or making of archives. A weapon for justice. So whether justice is about. Social justice.

Affective justice.

Political justice. Etc.

The idea is really to expose.

And to.

And to constantly expose. And reflect. Expose. And reflect. Expose.

And reflect. On questions that. You know. Are very varied.

And thank God they are. So yeah. So this is what.

I was.

Sort of. Trying to look at.

In terms of the. Bigger picture.

Of the. The conference.

I. I. I was finding it really interesting. We were talking. When you were. Talking about the.

The sort of. All the issues. About. Respect for the. Subjects. And the.

Safety of the archive. And all those things. Which are so.

To me.

More. You know. Different than. Sort of. Putting things up.

Regardless. Of what we know.

And. Sort of getting information out there. So there's this really funny tension. I thought. And I don't.

And not. And not to say that. Either one is. Is the way we should go. But I think there's.

I mean. I work on preservation. So it's very specific. You can't put more than one. Tape on a machine. At a time. You know.

You can't really. Just process. A whole bunch of material. Through.

Through.

And get it out there.

So. I was really struck by the. A lot of discussions. About these social spaces. And all kinds of social spaces. Support.

Support some of these. Values. That we seem to have been. Talking about. Or these. Kind of core.

Principles.

And things that. Align to. Other areas of. You know. This work. That we're doing.

Or.

So.

Yeah.

I was thinking.

More. About.

I mean.

I tend to work more.

With. See a collection. That I think. Really needs. To be worked on. And that it. Has an activist.

It has some. Some form of activism. Which created it. And then. How to sort of.

Build.

Around that. To bring. Some kind of support. For the collection. And some kind of. Decision making. Around the collection.

And.

So.

I was really. Interested here.

Some of those. Models about. How can we. Create a social space. In which. That can be done.

In which. These skills. Can be transferred. And in which. There can be. Decisions made. In the time.

In the time. That the work. Was developed.

And so. Is there sort of some.

And I guess. I was in a little bit. Of a like. You know. I'm just in the media world.

Where we feel. All this urgency. All the time. And feeling like.

Oh. This. All this other stuff. That was created.

All this other material.

And suddenly. I'm seeing the archive. Much bigger. Than what I do. On a. On a. Sort of daily basis.

So. I don't know. There's this sort of. Expansion. That's happening. For me.

But I also. I'm trying to process it. Through this very concrete.

And a way of working.

So.

It's. And I mean. I'm a little mind boggled. Actually. By everything. That I've heard. And also. I think. That we can be speaking. So locally. And so.

You know.

Specifically. And then we can also.

Be speaking about. Like really intense. International.

Relationships. It's exciting.

It's also like. A little overwhelming.

Well.

I think.

I think. Part of that. Is this idea.

That. There. Can always.

All. Connect. And that.

To make. The space. For that.

And also. With the idea. Of the archive.

As a. As a space. Of redemption. I think.

One thing. That I enjoyed. About the presentations.

Here. In the conference. Was.

That there was. There was a sense. Of. Being.

Attendant.

To abiding. Absences. But. At the same time.

Kind of. A corrective.

Or.

Additive. Contribution. To. What. We would.

Understand. As. The stable.

Whole story. So. There is. No. Kind of. Whole story. That we are. Seeking. To. Write. Or.

Fix. society. Of. Narratives.

And. Issues. That.

Could. Be. Connected. That I think.

Was.

Very.

Interesting. conferences are always very intense and then everybody goes home and sort of moves on with their life and I remember at the very beginning yesterday morning you mentioned a website that would be created for with the archived conference so if you can tell us a little bit how you're building the archive and how we can continue maybe the conversation or create new conversations on the website by you know how is that open and you know I think that would be by the way Mariam built that website from scratch in her spare time we have planning with Ed Potter yeah I didn't sleep a lot this month or last month but I did have help from a really from Edward Potter who's a really old friend when I used to make net art yeah net art really has disappeared I actually used to make another yeah I used to make net art when I used to make net art yeah Ed Potter is the person who taught me to program and he came he he joined up with me again and we built the site together so radical archives.net is online but what is online now is just the beginning of what we hope will continue to grow over at least the next year the site is built so that other people can contribute to it there's a back end which is open basically all you have to do is email me and I will give you a login and a password and then you too can write on radical archives.net you too can post things to radical archives.net I really hope you will do that so I don't have to do it all please please ask me for a login and a password please we really would like to post as many because otherwise oh no because it's on my own server and otherwise it could be hacked yeah yeah yeah just to write just to just to post things yeah so that people can't write like XSS code on my on my server and crash it yeah because that would be bad that would be really bad oh no no no no it's just a practical question so yes so I we really hope that all of the presenters will agree to post their their full papers and presentations on the site if you don't want to of course we understand but or or thoughts that have come to your mind in engaging with other people in the conference that then you want to work on further so it's if you want to send us a ring board yes if you want to point us to relevant things other events that you're involved other projects are involved in that are relevant all of these kinds of things we we hope will become part of the site there are also other projects that were and and papers that were submitted through the open call that we couldn't include in the conference but that we really enjoyed and thought were super interesting and those will also become part of the site there are also people who we really wanted to have be part of the conference but who were you know presenting at other conferences this weekend or we're out of town or you know just couldn't be here for one reason or another and that will also become part of the site so it can be a larger conversation yeah yeah and now it's time for you guys to ask some questions it's really just a transition maybe to opening it up which is in part that I think a website can be an incredible resource as well and that you know getting back to basics maybe saying the obvious I mean I think perhaps a lot of us may think of ourselves ultimately as organizers perhaps I'm not sure I can't speak for everybody but in some ways there's a basic so of course we have very intersectional multiple identities but I think ultimately if your bottom line identification is not so much as an academic or this or that or an archivist but that as an organizer then then we're really talking about basic organizing skills and basic organizing processes I mean certainly for myself you know early on I was deeply influenced by in the midst of lots of sectarianism in the political movement by Ferrer you know Paulo Ferrer and his his approaches towards organizing you know so there's like some fundamental questions about organizing and how do you build capacity and how do you create a groundswell that is not necessarily privileging one particular fight or another we're talking about such a complex set of issues and some are the most coming you know we should we all need to be thinking about global warming we all need to be thinking about drones beyond you know but many of us are in very local places focusing on whatever we're working on that that that makes us feel that perhaps what we're doing is not important but I guess I would really say that from an organizers perspective what we are doing locally is incredibly important and we need to be always thinking about how we what we're doing is in a relationship to a network of people that the more we can organize in coordination the more possible that these changes can happen otherwise I'm always afraid that somehow the latest biggest crisis will then begin to seem that that's that's what we have to work and we have to shift to that side of the boat and this side of the boat so I guess I really want to put in some words about why all the work I mean so I'm really interested in why people have come and what makes this moment that in some ways Chitra and Maryam have embodied in their call what makes this moment such an important one that people have come from all over right to want to respond but also what's the particularity of the organizing questions that you're dealing with that that may be entirely different but are incredibly compelling and important at the same time and how do we begin to see those as related right so I guess I want to kind of help to kind of create that space in which many of us can feel that there is something there that's actually quite important I certainly with my students have been told that a lot of them feel we can call them Millennials whatever you want to call them whatever they want to call themselves but you know in some ways they've grown up with too much overwhelming knowledge and impending doom and so many fronts right to the point that there's a feeling that what can we do anything we do so you know but at the same time there's an incredible spirit and generosity and humor and and you know so I found you know so in some ways we have these generational differences and what motivates us and what and these different regional differences in terms of what is the most compelling issue but I guess I really want I'm hoping we can kind of keep this a very broad open space in which lots of those issues can be kind of seen as important and not as somehow not as important as something else so I wanted to kind of make a call for that maybe that's a transition I mean there's a really compelling question brought up during the interference archive panel which is how can an archive support a movement I think a lot of us have asked that question in different ways in our work with archives and in one way or this this conference has brought together a sort of temporary movement around the idea of radical archives so we're going to try and have the website also support that movement let me be an archive that supports that movement I wanted to just also very because I didn't neglected to mention it earlier say that the incredible interviews that span have done this weekend will also be part of that website and I think those will answer some of the questions that Jack has just posed because those are some of the questions that Carol and Jules asked during the interviews so hopefully we'll we'll get to read some of those as they get transcribed and posted to the website and I'm really really looking forward to that as another part of this archive of the radical archives conference that will be unfolding on the website okay let's so what questions do you have I guess I'm just going to respond a little bit to what Jack was saying and that is that I I think ownership is very important I I think that the sense that you can't do anything as an individual is really a problem because I think particularly in the United States individuals have a great deal of power individual rights do there's an awful lot of citizen can do if they care if they really feel that they own the problem and the the the difficulty is that it takes a very long time to make change so then the question is how do you set up the structures and have a good strategy and proper and advisors who are going to stick with you that's quite difficult forming a nonprofit organization that actually can survive and that has goals that you can achieve incrementally that's something where you have to be able to partner with people of different generations I think to be able to do it and you can't really do it alone but the sense that you know we don't own anything and I don't think that's the purpose I think an archive can change things if it's structured in a way that it helps people to connect to the problem and if the problem is focused enough and is broken down into these increments so that people have a sense that they belong that they can engage in it and that and that it's going somewhere and there's leadership involved in that is quite it's quite difficult but interesting and very very fulfilling work to do and so I think what I would hope that comes out of this is that there that that we can reach out to each other and ask for advice as to how to solve little problems and anybody in an organizational capacity has these little problems that come up all the time and you you have to know which ones you can kind of let go of and which ones you really need to focus on and how do you bring people together to solve it so the sense of not ownership I think is a problem that it's very important for people to engage as citizens does anybody want to respond to that on the panel or you can me I'm I'm going to I'm going to respond to a couple of things that you said one is that I think that the the role and the place of the individual as you said in the United States is distinctly different from that in the rest of the world so that's just a very basic thing that we would consider as a context from which to start and the other thing that you were talking about that I think was interesting is something that came up often is the idea of the archive as a place for intergenerational knowledge sharing and production so that was a threat that was repeated throughout the conference that I wanted to bring up and the third one was this question of institutions I feel like that was a very looming and lingering question of people who were interested in institutional engagement and those who were interested in rejecting it so well I think there was a there was a thing that happened in the conference where there's a specter of the tension between grassroots and institutional archives which was raised and then there was an attempt to disperse it again because in a way it's a false tension you know there's there's a it's possible to invent archives where none exist but at the same time respect the archives that do already exist and I think we don't have to let the invention of new archives be a denial of the archives that already exist the two can exist together at the same time the two practices can be in harmony they do not have to be intention and opposition to each other right you know I I am I actually garden but I'm a terrible harvester and I mean sometimes I'll lead to stuff but usually I need somebody to help me eat it you know make something feed me and I feel like that's kind of where like that I'm a little bit of a preservation nerd and that the people who are really pushing access I just really appreciate and and I think that so to me and the things that are happening you know I do a lot deal a lot with institutions I also deal a lot with people who are outside institutions so it's to me it's like there's a lot of room for for for like totally acts that generally just get stuff yeah getting stuff out there and then there are people who you know who are doing the other part and or thinking about the other part who can be resources or whatever to whatever happens sometimes stuff just gets used up I mean it's certainly better than stuff you know it's sitting in an archive and nothing's happening you know just so much video and film and archives it's ridiculous somebody should harvest it you know it's like instead of just me tending that you know the the row or something it's ridiculous so you know sometimes it's going to be lost like just just use it so that's so I feel like there's a lot of room for hello everybody it's really nice to be here finally I'm an organizer myself so I was stuck in my house organizing for something that's coming up in October unfortunately I missed most of this but I'm happy I'm here and connecting to the energy physically of all of you the question or comment and something that you just touched on is access those of us who make the content or organize the content and gather it and then then they're also needs it's one thing to for it to be there to exist and then how does that get accessed by those who need it most one of one of the things that I have a problem with in the art world and in general and academic every field you know we could end up just being people who speak to ourselves because you know we care and we have particular interest and we do a lot of information but my my particular focus and interest is always about how do I make this then access accessible to the crowd beyond me and my capacity to to even engage with it or understand it and so the question I had for China for example is exactly that the challenge of first of all you know with organizing Padma and then now that it has come to a stage where all these major institutions are trying to connect with it so you can have accessibility but then what does happen to the the content and the essence of content and maybe the original idea behind that project and the balance yeah yeah Lisa those are again important questions that we rattled with every day but I think just to go back to you weren't here for the for the for the talk in the afternoon but I spent some time trying to describe the ethics of the archive right and this now crudely put now is let's say the system behind the archive and the design right this back end this back end at bare and bones it's legal framework it's it's you know it's conceptual ethics and identity we've thought through a lot of these issues in in designing the archive so for one it's interpretive right you can layer you can keep annotating and we believe if we care okay this institutional material is in and maybe this is not the place for it do something about it critique it write about it and these were early discussions we had where we said well maybe if there has to be a place for hate speech maybe the place for that is also in Padma because you can't you know you have to problematize things you can't sweep them under a carpet because you will not have a critical discourse about it so put it there and if you care and it makes you feel uncomfortable critique it annotated interpreted in a sensible way in an interesting way not that these are safeguards but this is a conceptual framework and then we we we we we we we struggle with it and we it it offers these these these possibilities um the entire source code is open source so we offer we you know the institutions are could be i don't know what shape it's going to take but um to have the increasingly it's going to be a scientific academic academy say the music and dance academy of india to say yes if you work out the legalese all 12 000 hours of you know entire film archive of indian classical arts can go online hey interesting extremely possible and like um it would really change in the way we have understood um and had access to our culture um if it's done the padma way I don't see how anything's compromised download yes interesting extremely possible and like it would really change the way we have understood and had access to our culture if it's done the Padma way I don't see how anything is compromised download yes reuse for non-commercial pedagogic and educational and research use yes please annotate it deeply it's not going to go up without annotation this annotation is going to be intergenerational there's a lineage to our classical arts is going to be the second or third generation who's going to annotate it with the disciple of that guru and so on and so forth what are we doing we're creating exactly this continuous you know re-looking at our culture so I think within the ethics of the archive there are these things that we don't want to be like the you know Padma doesn't want to be the holding house for all of this fork it do it in another way we've already forked it there's Indian cinema there's Turkish cinema dot mark we wanted to buy the domain AF dot AF it's gone now but that was going to be a conference dot AF there's arsenale dot berl dot in so yeah there's it should in this there's quite a few in one I think Cinematheque Cairo is Cinematheque is working with one as well go ahead go ahead well it and this is actually partly in response to to your project the tapir cinema and because I keep thinking back to that image of are you describing people sitting around in a space and you also described it as a kind of quiet time or time out to be able to take in the media and I think that was striking to me partly from my own queer precincts where I do want to talk about the the ordinariness of a kind of organizing that that is sometimes can be digital but is also about live bodies in this space in a very modest way where we need to have these curatorial moments where we do select from the you know vast array of materials that are available to us I think I feel this as a teacher that that's often you know putting teaching and organizing together and room and and keeping in mind also which is maybe falling out a little bit on myself and I think focusing more on the trauma negative affect side of things but also sort of modes of survival and joy because that is partly also the justice we're working for right as a kind of resilience that is a reminder to of of our capacity to come together in the face of tremendous injustice and so I do try to count it as an ordinary victory just to have a moment where say a few of us are together taking in some particular moment in the archive and I think too of Audre Lorde in poetry is not a luxury which takes us back to the question of the aesthetic or the poetic seeing there are no new ideas there are just new ways of making them felt and that is a work to to to make it felt but just to remind ourselves that we we know like we know what's going on at some level and and and and then we have to find ways to process that for ourselves through our encounters with these forms of information and so I I just want to also acknowledge that part in the chain of sort of you know harvesting processing etc that's that is also against that hopelessness of feeling like you're just overwhelmed by information and you don't know what to do so just like that little piece in the in the chain of of a kind of cultural sovereignty that's affective is really important for me to think about I just want to add just one word which we heard today and I can't remember and I'm sorry about this the actual panel it was in time the time factor so I mean just you know my very little experience with the revolution in Egypt for example was that you know I'm an artist I've been working in Egypt for many years under the dictatorship of Mubarak and all of a sudden when the revolution started I you know I got completely frozen I just watched and participated left my camera at home because anyway it wasn't really my tool anymore and just watched everybody produce all this stuff and you know the tsunami of media that came out of all of that and it was very interesting because I had to stop and ask myself like you know how had dictatorship shaped my work and how was I going to respond to what was happening and who was I going to be in this new in this new Egypt and it was you know my my actual reaction was to build an archive on Tahrir and to know that because of the way I I work that I had to participate of course as a citizen before anything but I I just watched and I was really fascinated by also the things I couldn't really understand and relate to because I'm not only Egyptian so for me the questions were very different than for most people in Tahrir and and so I had a really I felt I had a you know very Egyptian while not at all relationship with the revolution and so it was very interesting and it took me about one year to come back to my I would say classical art practice but in that first year my participation was very much to create archive with radio Tahrir which I didn't talk about because I can't talk about everything that happened and short moment we had but and of course Tahrir cinema so that was one of the response as a visual artist that I very spontaneously had a few months down in the revolution and it was very interesting because it only was after a year that I started produce work and actually reflect on what had happened already in one year while knowing that this was you know the first getting rid of the first overload because you're like you're like a goose being fed you know with you know it's so intense I mean you know you cannot imagine how intense it was it was you know it was really you know it's 24 hours it's coming from the street from under your house from across the Nile from Tahrir from your friends from people calling from the media I mean there's so many varied highways of information and everything is very crowded so so the first thing you do and it's just natural is you need to get rid of it you know you need to like sort of you know either get you know get it out of your system or make sense of it somehow and you know and that's also very you know a very you know it's it's beyond thinking about things and you know at that point you're not thinking you're surviving you're dealing you're you know it's really there's no time for copyright and not copyright and I don't know what I mean you know it's a it's about you know it's about it's about life and it's about it's about others it's about people dying next to you it's about being people being raped next next to you it's about I mean it's about these crazy things that don't happen every day in your life normally and it's about keeping sanity within that so in a way archive is you know a survival method and I think archive is really about at the end of the day it's about we're all fighting death in a way we're all we all know we're going to die and we all know that's and in a way and or beginning I don't know but there is there is an aspect that's very human and all of this which I think is very beautiful also but you know that's it that's what I wanted to say but I also want to and I changed subjects very abruptly and I'm sorry about that but I want to answer you out there yes but you know I want now I'm going to shift in something else and I want to come back to what you are asking and I know you weren't asking me but because you weren't here yesterday morning I want to come back to also being part of a foundation in Lebanon which is called Arab image foundation which I spoke a bit very little about yesterday and answer you from almost the opposite direction from the question you asked is you're asking you know what happens when such a successful archive becomes kind of haunted by institutional monsters and once you know is threatened to be absorbed in the institutional world the question for me is interesting because we have the opposite problem and in the Arab image foundation 17 years ago we were a group of I can't remember how many we were maybe eight or ten whatever we were video artists visual artists photographers and people interested in photography and we created this foundation out of you know it was the three people who founded the foundation were having a glass of vodka on top of a mountain in Lebanon and decided they had to save their family photographs and you know it started like that and and from one thing leading to another it became an actual foundation that was registered as such and that started to you know and each of and one each each of us went across different geographies and started collecting studio photographs etc or family photographs and in different places in different ways etc and it was never really a collective or a collaboration it was just people who had the same desire of rebuilding the Middle East after the Lebanese war and of finding connections between countries in the region of you know of living finally you know of having a life and and of understanding what happened to us so whether we were Egyptians Iraqi Palestinian etc we had we all had the same problem and today you know the foundation is in the region really a model for preserving archives so we've developed projects recently in the last three years which is part of the MEPI project which is basically training people in the region and the region has grown because definitions change and so from being this little part of the Arab world we've come like we've expanded to Morocco all the way to the Emirates and I don't know what even Iran sometimes is confused with the Middle East so whatever but you know there is there is now a real problem is how do we do how do we think the foundation from within and not from you know from outside and how do we grow without losing its spirit the original spirit or does it matter and do we have to lose the original spirit that's created it so you know there's a practical answer is that you know when things grow they grow you know you can't you know you can't you know they have to grow so you need more people you have more ways of thinking and you need to sort of institutionalize or create structures within which you know people work so that's also a problem so that's also I don't know if I'm answering your question also from okay so we're out of time unfortunately so I'll just leave you with a very brief closing thought I want to thank everyone who participated in this conference whether as a presenter as an audience member as an organizer support staff sponsor advisory committee working group member everybody who contributed to it you were all amazing um and you made for an amazing event um I'm completely overwhelmed with how much I learned this weekend completely overwhelmed um it's like yeah mind blown um I think we all feel like we have absorbed a series of brilliant fragments of information all these different perspectives all these different pieces and I think over the next week the next two weeks we'll shake them up like a kaleidoscope and they'll settle into new patterns um so uh like I said we really would love to get those impressions from you as part of our kind of archive of the archive um and uh in whatever form you want to contribute them your notes your thoughts and I think um and what you can love to hear what you want to hear what you think now or later when things settle we don't have time um no thank you guys very much and just on that note I think um the question of time and the commitment over a period of time is something that everybody has both embodied and articulated and I think that's a lot of the that for me is a lot of the answer of a question like access and so um Thank you guys so much, and please continue the conversation in your head, or with each other, or with us, or we will also.

However you prefer, really. Yeah, or all of the above.

Thank you.

Pad.ma requires JavaScript.