Archive/Counter-Archive
Permanent URI for this collectionhttps://hdl.handle.net/10315/43166
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Item type: Item , Access status: Open Access , Vancouver’s 1980s Feminist Debates: Pornography and Censorship in the Archives Gendered Violence: Responses and Remediation(2024) Brushwood Rose, Chloë; Demus, AxelleABOUT OUR EDUCATIONAL GUIDES SERIES One of the central goals of Archive/Counter-Archive is to increase public engagement with our partner organizations and their collections through an “activation” of archival materials that foregrounds the pressing need to rethink what archives can/might do in the 21st century. In order to achieve this goal, we have developed a series of Educational Guides designed to accompany film and video from A/CA’s Case Studies and facilitate their integration into K-12 and postsecondary classrooms. About the Guide This educational guide activates one of three archival collections held at VIVO Media Arts Centre’s Crista Dahl Media Library that focus on the subject of gendered violence as it was discussed, debated, and exhibited in and around Vancouver in the 1980s. Although united by a common theme, these collections span a variety of topics: feminist porn wars and resistance to censorship, activist video responses to the Pinochet dictatorship, and the 1989 In Visible Colours film and media festival which aimed to foreground discussions of settler colonialism, decolonization, Indigeneity, and solidarity. Taken together, these three collections generate intersectional and multigenerational dialogue about gendered violence; as such, the films and videos in this archive are modes of creative resistance against several forms of subordination and oppression. In partnership with VIVO, the Archive/Counter-Archive project has developed three separate educational guides that engage with each collection as part of its Gendered Violence: Responses and Remediation Case Study. These guides are available digitally and for free at counterarchive.ca This specific guide centres on the feminist debates regarding issues of pornography and censorship that took place in Vancouver in the 1980s. Indeed, in the 1980s, many Vancouver feminists opposed to porn drew on the language of gender violence to make their case, arguing that all sexually explicit images of women were harmful. Working against this position and the creep of censorship into smaller moving image formats in the province, queer and feminist artists defended sexual expression and created alternative visual languages for sex. In particular, this guide expands on the 2022 mail-art project developed by Vancouver-based artists Hazel Meyer and Cait McKinney in collaboration with VIVO and Archive/Counter-Archive entitled The images, such as they are, do have an effect on us. The guide features images and videos documenting Meyer and McKinney’s mail art project, an essay by Ana Valine on the feminist debates regarding sexual representation and censorship in the 1980s, and contextualizing images and videos. The curated material is listed in the suggested order of viewing and a list of discussion questions is included to encourage conversation. We recommend previewing the works before you screen them for your students and reading the contextualizing information provided in this guide. Please note that some videos contain graphic imagery."Item type: Item , Access status: Open Access , Women, Art, and the Periphery & Latin American Video Art in the VIVO Media Arts Centre Archives Gendered Violence: Responses and Remediation(2024) Brushwood Rose, Chloë; Demus, AxelleABOUT OUR EDUCATIONAL GUIDES SERIES One of the central goals of Archive/Counter-Archive is to increase public engagement with our partner organizations and their collections through an “activation” of archival materials that foregrounds the pressing need to rethink what archives can/might do in the 21st century. In order to achieve this goal, we have developed a series of Educational Guides designed to accompany film and video from A/CA’s Case Studies and facilitate their integration into K-12 and postsecondary classrooms. About the Guide This educational guide activates one of three archival collections held at VIVO Media Arts Centre’s Crista Dahl Media Library that focus on the subject of gendered violence as it was discussed, debated, and exhibited in and around Vancouver in the 1980s. Although united by a common theme, these collections span a variety of topics: feminist porn wars and resistance to censorship, activist video responses to the Pinochet dictatorship, and the 1989 In Visible Colours film and media festival which aimed to foreground discussions of settler colonialism, decolonization, Indigeneity, and solidarity. Taken together, these three collections generate intersectional and multigenerational dialogue about gendered violence; as such, the films and videos in this archive are modes of creative resistance against several forms of subordination and oppression. In partnership with VIVO, the Archive/Counter-Archive project has developed three separate educational guides that engage with each collection as part of its Gendered Violence: Responses and Remediation Case Study. These guides are available digitally and for free at counterarchive.ca This specific guide centres on Women, Art & the Periphery (WAP), a series of multimedia events conceived and curated by artist and academic Sara Diamond in 1987 which featured contemporary art by Chilean women, and draws from the 2023 revisitation of WAP, Latin American Video Art in the VIVO Media Arts Archives, curated by media artist and cultural historian Gabriela Aceves Sepúlveda. Taking the documentation of Women, Art and the Periphery as a point of departure, this recent event featured a screening and library showcase of a selection of Latin American video, audio, and archival documentation from the Crista Dahl Media Library & Archive (CDMLA) at VIVO to celebrate the launch of the edited volume Encounters in Video Art in Latin America (eds. Elena Shtromberg and Glenn Phillips, 2023). This guide includes a curatorial essay by Roya Akbari, a list of 5 videos suggested for classroom viewing, synopses, and discussion questions oriented toward a range of thematic areas. We recommend previewing the works before you screen them for your students and reading the contextualizing information provided in this guide. Please note that some of the works involve nudity and sexual innuendos.Item type: Item , Access status: Open Access , "Lignes de désir La vidéo expérimentale comme intervention sociale et spatiale"(2025) Brushwood Rose, Chloë; Demus, Axelle"À propos d’Archive/Contre-Archive Archive/Contre-Archive (A/CA) : Activer le patrimoine de l’image en mouvement du Canada est un projet de création et de recherche dirigé par Janine Marchessault et financé par une subvention de partenariat du Conseil de recherches en sciences humaines du Canada. Ce projet rassemble quatre universités, plusieurs communautés, des institutions patrimoniales et des experts en politiques publiques. Il vise à restaurer et activer le patrimoine audiovisuel produit par les peuples autochtones (Premières Nations, Métis et Inuits), les femmes, les personnes Afro-descendant·e·s et les minorités visibles, les personnes 2ELGBTQI+ et les personnes issues de l’immigration. De plus, A/CA vise à établir un réseau favorisant l’émergence de meilleures pratiques et politiques culturelles. Dans le cadre de ce projet, Archive/Contre-Archive a produit un certain nombre de guides éducatifs en libre accès disponibles gratuitement sur son site web : www.counterarchive.ca À propos de ce guide Ce guide propose une sélection de douze vidéos, commissariées par Alanna Thain et Ylenia Olibet. Il comprend un essai contextuel rédigé par Thain et Olibet ainsi que des descriptions et des questions pour la discussion en classe, axées sur des thèmes variés. Nous vous recommandons de visionner les oeuvres à l’avance avant de les présenter à vos étudiant·e·s, en suivant l’ordre suggéré. Nous vous conseillons également de lire les informations contextuelles fournies dans ce guide. Veuillez noter que certaines vidéos abordent des thèmes troublants."Item type: Item , Access status: Open Access , "Desire Lines Experimental Video as Social and Spatial Interventions"(2025) Brushwood Rose, Chloë; Demus, AxelleABOUT OUR EDUCATIONAL GUIDES SERIES One of the central goals of Archive/Counter-Archive is to increase public engagement with our partner organizations and their collections through an “activation” of archival materials that foregrounds the pressing need to rethink what archives can/might do in the 21st century. In order to achieve this goal, we have developed a series of Educational Guides designed to accompany film and video from A/CA’s Case Studies and facilitate their integration into K-12 and postsecondary classrooms. About the Guide This guide includes a selection of twelve videos curated by Alanna Thain and Ylenia Olibet. It includes a curatorial essay by Thain and Olibet, synopses, and discussion questions oriented toward a range of thematic areas. We recommend previewing the works before you screen them for your students in the order that they are suggested. We also recommend reading the contextualizing information provided in this guide. Please note that some of the videos contain distressing themes."Item type: Item , Access status: Open Access , Welcome to the Neighbourhood: Inside the Winnipeg Film Group’s Indigenous Film and Video Collections(2025) Brushwood Rose, Chloë; Demus, AxelleABOUT OUR EDUCATIONAL GUIDES SERIES One of the central goals of Archive/Counter-Archive is to increase public engagement with our partner organizations and their collections through an “activation” of archival materials that foregrounds the pressing need to rethink what archives can/might do in the 21st century. In order to achieve this goal, we have developed a series of Educational Guides designed to accompany film and video from A/CA’s Case Studies and facilitate their integration into K-12 and postsecondary classrooms About the Guide This guide includes a selection of ten videos curated by Lita Fontaine. It includes an interview witth Lita Fontaine, as well as synopses and discussion questions oriented toward a range of thematic areas. We recommend previewing the works before you screen them for your students in the order that they are suggested. We also recommend reading the contextualizing information provided in this guide. Please note that some of the videos contain distressing themes.Item type: Item , Access status: Open Access , Archive/Counter-Archive: Activating Principles of Respect in Archival Policy Development(ESSACHESS Academic Association, 2022-06-23) Sicondolfo , Claudia; Swanson, Raegan Mary; Ebanks Schlums, Debbie; Bourcheix-Laporte, Mariane; Luka, Mary ElizabethArchive/Counter-Archive (A/CA): Activating Canada's Moving Image Heritage is a seven-year research-creation project involving more than 100 collaborating artists, academics, and activists from across the country that reveals how Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) come into contact with vulnerable community-driven audiovisual archives, an important part of contemporary cultural heritage. This article examines the power dynamics embedded in A/CA as well as in current ICT infrastructure, legislation, and organizational policy and resources, to address two emergent challenges experienced by the network over a three-year period. The authors ask whether and in what ways A/CA was able to oppose the extractive power dynamics embedded within the current cultural heritage preservation and ICT management systems through operational models and ICT tools that incorporate creative approaches. Locating this project where community-engaged research comes together with the study of digitization and platformization of cultural production and heritage, the authors used autoethnographic and feminist intersectional discourse analyses to examine the tensions and challenges embedded in the communities of practice that took shape over these three years. The first set of findings explores the organizational limits imposed on the network’s participants, including the lack of national and local resources for digitizing and sharing vulnerable and often marginalized media archives. This was addressed in the A/CA context by developing a flexible contracting approach for the digitization and use of the vulnerable media being digitized, as well as through the development of a national Action Plan. The second set of findings demonstrates how creative interventions in community-based partnerships and artist residencies affected the genesis of a Principles of Respect (PoR) Committee and related pragmatic in-the-field efforts to address some of the historically troubled relationships that large, official media archives have had with Indigenous and Black communities. The authors explore the ways in which creative workshops and artist residencies are mobilized within A/CA to help build a more respectful and reciprocal set of relations. Lastly, we examine the broader implications for intellectual property and content management as it is influenced by the current role of ICTs in relation to cultural heritage, suggesting some ways forward.