TFMS: Archiving the Ephemeral: Transitioning Practices

Friday, December 10 • 4:00 EST • Social to follow 5:30 EST
Zoom Registration link

Archives and archival research practices within film and media studies are quickly shifting and expanding. New archival collections as well as changing practices in the digital age are making archival research more accessible and central to research. Please join our panel of speakers Karine Bertrand, Felicity Tayler and Faith Paré, and Cleo Sallis-Parchet, to discuss archives and transitioning practices.

Conveners: Taien Ng-Chan (York University) and Jessica Whitehead (University of Toronto)

Reflecting on Desire Lines: Mapping the metadata of Toronto Arts Publishing (1976-1987)

This pandemic moment has reproduced us all through the poor images of zoom rooms; with this context in mind, we will reflect on our personal experiences of the Desire Lines speaker series, hosted by the AGYU in collaboration with Artexte and Spoken Web from February through May 2021. The series made visible communities of publishing production as a collective undertaking, but featured major figures in the recent histories of Canadian art publishing milieu. We’ll think about the strengths and limitations of the ethics of care we embraced throughout the series, while creating our own archive of video and transcripts, and how that shaped this conversion of the intimate space of oral history into a public conversation.

Felicity Tayler, MILS, PhD is the Research Data Management Librarian at the University of Ottawa. Her interests include art historical metadata modeling, data visualization, and the print culture of artistic community. This series grows out of a Fellowship in the Department of History of Art at the University of Toronto. It is informed by her work as co-applicant on the SSHRC-funded SpokenWeb partnership, which foregrounds a coordinated and collaborative approach to literary historical study and digital development, with diverse collections of spoken recordings from across Canada and beyond.

Faith Paré is a poet and performer of Afro-Guyanese and Québécois ancestries. Her writing has previously appeared in Arc Poetry Magazine, GUTS, and Shameless Magazine, and is forthcoming in Carnation. She is a proud alum of Our Bodies, Our Stories, a mentorship for emerging artists who are queer and trans BIPOC led by Kama La Mackerel, and was the recipient of the Quebec Writers’ Federation’s 2020 Mairuth Sarsfield Mentorship under the guidance of Dr. Gillian Sze. She is a co-founder of VOLTA Collective with Meredith Marty-Dugas and Paige Keleher, addressing anti-carceral action and transformative justice through creative intervention. Find her @paretriarchy.

Locating Lost Memories: Digitization and Media Preservation Strategies

Drawing from an interest in archival theory and media archaeology, Cleo Sallis-Parchet explores the preservation of obsolete technologies and vulnerable art forms. Her research and case studies have revealed important concerns raised by artists, archivists, and institutions as the future of media artworks remains at risk in archival repositories. A recent research residency at Vtape lead her to uncover an interview of Agnes Varda at her arrival at the Women & Film Festival in Toronto in 1973. This open-reel videotape, which had been sitting in a box for decades, was thoroughly cleaned, digitized, and transformed into a digital video file, showing the significance of the realm of media preservation in sustaining past and future memories. In this presentation, Cleo will reflect on dynamic approaches by artists & institutions in providing a longevity for the constantly changing nature of media art forms.

Cleo Sallis-Parchet is a graduate student at York University researching the preservation and longevity of media, cinematic, and digital art forms through archival methodologies. Her research explores the ephemerality and variability of media art and its impact on preservation practices for artists and archives, as well as the role of the institution in preserving, transmitting, and extending the life of vulnerable media.

The Arnait Video Productions archive: the challenges and rewards of intercultural and intergenerational collaborations

Inspired by Indigenous Methodologies, this presentation seeks to tell the story of the fruitful collaboration between the team of researchers at Queen’s, including the members of the Vulnerable Media lab, and the Inuit women’s collective Arnait Video Productions, who have been promoting the unique culture and voices of Inuit women for thirsty years now, building bridges with Canadians of all origins. Through the decolonizing action of storytelling, I will explain the intercultural and collaborative dimension of the collective, as well as the challenges and rewards of working to remediate material that are meant to be living archives, serving not only to keep cultural memory and intergenerational connections alive and well, but also learning to respect the space and time of a culture catering to different needs and wants.

Karine Bertrand is an Associate Professor in the Film and Media department of Queen’s University and co-director of the inter-university research group EPIC. She is also a member of the Maniwaki Métis Community. Her research interests are centered around Indigenous film and poetry, Quebec cinema, road movies, transnational cinemas and oral practices of cinema. She is presently working with the Arnait Video Productions collective of Inuit women.

TFMS partners include:
Brock University • OCAD University • Ryerson University • Sheridan College • TIFF Higher Learning • Queen’s University • University of Guelph • University of Toronto • Wilfrid Laurier University • York University