Women, Art, and the Periphery & Latin American Video Art in the VIVO Media Arts Centre Archives Gendered Violence: Responses and Remediation

Abstract

ABOUT 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.