Living Archive. Archive Work as a Contemporary Artistic and Curatorial Practice (2011-2013)

Following a project duration of two years, 38 curators, filmmakers, artists and other researchers were invited to develop projects around the Arsenal archive holdings. The idea was to consciously initiate projects that would carry out archival work as part of their development, so as to link research, preservation and publication in the context of contemporary curatorial and artistic practice. “Living Archive” thus represented the attempt to undertake archival work that does not serve self-preservation only but is contemporary, creates something new and enables new approaches. 

As invited participant of “Living Archive” Nicole Wolf starts a collaborative process with Deepa Dhanraj for the restoration of Yugantar's films (and the restoration of Dhanraj’s film Kya Hua is Shaher Ko). From the beginning the importance of historical research is infused with inquiries concerning the implications of re-watching and debating collectively and projecting onwards with and through Yugantar's practice and films and how these practices inflected archival practices as well as modes of curating, programming and exhibiting.

Versatile Archives and Cinematic Friendships

My interest in the histories of documentary and specifically feminist film practices in India as well as a wider concern with questions of how film-aesthetic and -political alliances could be thought of today to make productive a legacy of political cinema internationalism, led me to look at a series of constellations within the archive.

What then occurred as missing were the films Deepa Dhanraj made as part of the feminist film collective Yugantar, founded in 1980: MOLKARIN (Maid Servant) (1981), TAMBAKU CHAAKILA OOB ALI (Tobacco Ember) (1982), SUDESHA (1983) and IDHI KATHA MATRAMENA (Is this just a story?) (1983).

This archival impulse was however not one of solidifying a national documentary history, of filling a gap that would account for its feminist components or to correct constructions of feminist film histories based on practices in Europe and the US. While the politics of gaps are essential to be acknowledged it deemed more productive to playfully speculate on what the insertion of Yugantar’s films could actualize within the archive. An eclectic and speculative addition seemed appropriate for an archive which was itself built through personal relations and nurtured through a passion for cinema as intrinsically political. Furthermore, in 1973 the 1. Internationale Frauenfilmseminar took place in the Arsenal, a Modellseminar to which Yugantar’s focus on female labour as well as their investigation of the family as an institution could potentially have contributed.

What could be other sensibilities, queries and urgencies shared across the archive? Can feminist affiliations be outlined? Which other film collectives have forged political vocabularies? How might one then redress cinematic friendships in the archive for the present?

Seminar: Engaging Cinema: re-viewing collective practices

The collective and collaborative process of each of Yugantar’s films, their stress on ‘standing with’ those that their films were seeking to engage in cinematic and political terms and a strong sense of creating a radical space of possibilities, suggests an energy that we wanted to respond to during this seminar. With invited guests, each of whom had a close relation to collective film politics, we explored what it might mean to project our desires and urgencies in the presents onto those of the past, to extend, to explore, to discuss, share, critique and value. Could thinking with film-political terms that were challenged or created then help to revalue as well as rethink them or, to invent new ways of engaging cinema altogether.
During the first day of the seminar Deepa Dhanraj led through the making of Yugantar’s first three films, reflecting on the processes of working for each film, showing excerpts of the films through versions that had been filmed of the steenback at Arsenal cinema and sharing prior recordings of conversations with Abha Bhaiya and Lalitha K.