The research initiative on “Critical Audiovisual Heritage is led by Dr. Asli Özgen-Havekotte and Dr. Christian Olesen, the initiative will run from September 2024 to June 2029. The project brings together the grantees’ expertise and ongoing research on topics such as decolonising audiovisual archives, the epistemology of digital audiovisual collection access, reuse, and heritage.
Keywords: Critical audiovisual heritage, Diversity and decolonisation, Digital sensory audiovisual heritage.
Audiovisual heritage institutions increasingly seek to develop collaborative modes of engaging with and accessing collections beyond hegemonic conceptions of history and heritage. This entails actively including marginalized communities in innovative forms of archiving, challenging traditional text-based archival descriptions through audiovisual, creative, and sensory modes of access and reuse (Anand 2016; Piet 2023). Responding to this development, the Critical Audiovisual Heritage initiative has a dual focus: firstly, to develop an innovative theoretical framework rooted in contemporary archival practices and emerging collaborative methods; secondly, to propose alternative ways of creative and collaborative engagement by critically assessing existing practices.
Taking ‘the unknown’ as its starting point (such as gaps, absences, and silences in audiovisual archives and archiving), the project will research emerging speculative methods (Hartman 2008) (i.e. critical fabulation, potential history, radical imagination) and/or sensory approaches (such as. challenging traditional text-based archival descriptions through audiovisual, creative, and sensory modes of access and reuse (Barton 2024)) to address these. In doing so, the project will explore innovative collaborations between archives, communities, artists, and researchers, aiming to generate insights for novel archival practices that contribute to collaborative knowledge production, for example, through database creation, annotation, (online) exhibition formats, videographic scholarship or augmented reality formats that centre on affective, sensory, and audiovisual modes of access and reuse.
In a concerted effort to further collegial and scholarly collaboration around these topics at the University of Amsterdam, this project aspires to align with and combine the grantees’ collective expertise to address pressing issues within the audiovisual heritage field. To achieve this, the project will build upon the grantees existing body of academic work and ongoing research, in order to collectively respond to the evolving concerns surrounding collection access and reuse in audiovisual heritage institutions and/or independent archives. The grantees have previously collaborated within the scope of the CLARIAH Media Suite infrastructure project, co-organised the Eye International Conference, and integrated research-based perspectives into their teaching roles within the Media Studies department, specifically in the MA Film Studies and MA Preservation and Presentation of the Moving Image programmes. This approach will maximise the initiative’s resources and enable it to produce timely, impactful results that may contribute to renegotiating the status of audiovisual heritage in society at large. Moreover, to broaden the initiative’s research scope a jointly supervised PhD project based on original archival research focusing on the gaps, absences, and silences in the audiovisual heritage field as well as novel (digital) sensory methods to stimulate collaborative knowledge production on such archival lacunae will play a crucial part in the initiative.
Throughout these endeavours, the initiative cooperates with audiovisual heritage institutions and independent archives and/or collectives in the Netherlands and abroad, and the project grantees advance these objectives as leaders of two themes, respectively Diversity and Decolonisation (Dr. Asli Özgen-Havekotte) and Digital Sensory AV Heritage (Dr. Christian Olesen). A joint PhD candidate who will be starting in the Fall of 2024 will conduct research that aligns with the project’s overarching goals and enhances these two themes, while conducting original archival research in archives of their choice.
This theme explores creative ways of community engagement with marginalized audiovisual collections in state archival institutions, specifically the displaced, diasporic, and migrant artifacts. First, it aims to enhance the knowledge of these collections; and second, to reassess and transform core archival principles, particularly in terms of (shared) ownership, custodianship, radical care, restitution/return. Approaching archives not as repositories for but as agents of historiography (Harris 2021), this project is rooted in decolonial thought and praxis in its aim to enhance the archival representation of displaced and diasporic communities, as well as seeking to stimulate grassroots, collaborative, and community-led knowledge production and archival practices.
The project’s digital sensory audiovisual heritage-theme engages with the partner institution’s collections from the perspective of digital access and reuse, researching the role which digital formats may play in fostering collaborative, speculative, and counter-archival approaches to history and heritage. This will entail analysing collections from the perspective of understudied and under-described features (including audiovisual and affective features), in relation to collaborative forms of annotation, database creation and creative interventions. The theme contributes to discussions surrounding database-driven and community-based approaches to media heritage and history, with particular attention to the affordances of emerging sensory approaches in challenging established modes of archiving and collection access (Anderson 2011).
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Piet, Nadia. 2023. Beyond Search: Exploring Creative Approaches to Interfacing with Cultural Heritage Collections (A Case Study Analysis). Hilversum: Netherlands Institute for Sound & Vision.