The Times of the Archives
UnArchive Found Footage Fest is taking on a significant role in the cultural landscape. Italian and otherwise. Indeed. It represents in some ways an anti-festival. In the sense that the purpose of the days, which are rich and plural, is not to give rise to a showcase or some red carpet, but to contribute to the rewriting of the role of archiving in the now digital and soon quantum age.
Without underestimating the weight of holding and respectful recovery of audiovisual materials, the challenge shifts to the creation of content and cognitive heritages capable of shaping the fast seasons of artificial intelligence. The latter is a lucky brand, in truth an evocation of empty signifiers if there is no assumption of human production. Archive, then, means shaping technical development with qualitative intelligence and not mere trawling of data accumulated in ways often bordering on illegality. Data, in fact, belong to people and those who define their alphabets, not to aggregators who become the wholesalers of AI. Extractive Capital. This does not detract from the fact that the generations of the various AIs proceed at such a speed that Science cannot plan their evolution. AI is the favorite child of an anarcho-liberal season with its detritus and dangerous spectres. But we cannot surrender to the hopeless dialectical polarity between globalization and attempts to impose sovereignist forms of protectionism. Two cultural right-wingers challenge each other, corroding the nervous texture of democracy. Archiving becomes, then, the introibo of an alternative point of view. Past and future are welded together, painting the present in ways far more precise and articulate than elemental realism. Reuse is an aesthetic and not a mere narrative accident. That is to say: if we want to remain human in the season in which the post-human is on the horizon, let us raise the flag of archives: not a legacy of a past to be overcome, but an essential fragment for dreaming of an equitable and sympathetic modernity. Here UnArchive crosses festival boundaries and enters an area where the old analog compasses are not to be found: that’s the beauty of live, as a prestigious and somewhat forgotten journalist said: Gianni Minà.
Handling film content, images, is a form of cultural struggle, both against oblivion and homogenization to the dictatorship of fleeting contemporaneity and against the theft of intellectual labor. We need to think about open cognitive paradigms, in which the dutiful defense of copyright is unified with the search for different and perhaps unexplored ways to guarantee its substance. Open source as a feature of language goes hand in hand with the desire to protect the diversity and independence of cultural production.
UnArchive, in conclusion, in addition to a festival is an entity that seeks to critically interact with the media and post-media landscape. A bet that cannot be missed. That is why we are still here. Thanks to the magnificent collective of AAMOD and those who worked on the preparation of the event.
Vincenzo Vita
AAMOD President
House of Mirrors
UnArchive Found Footage Fest, despite its young age, is now recognized as a stable and unavoidable appointment of the Archivio Audiovisivo del Movimento Operaio e Democratico which conceived and produces it. Certainly because of the surprising success of the previous editions, animated by a young, attentive and participatory audience, but also because of the international community that has been forming around the festival. Artists, scholars, programmers, archivists, filmmakers… more and more people have found in this event a point of reference. For a week, the heart of Trastevere in Rome is transformed into what we sometimes call a found footage merry-go-round, among new
film visions, art installations, live audiovisual performances, panels, masterclasses and many informal moments of meeting and sharing.
The Festival continues to grow and one of the most evident signs is the expansion of collaborations, which in this third edition add to the already numerous ones of the past. To the well-established venues such as the Cinema Intrastevere, Live Alcazar, the Real Academia de España en Roma
and the Casa delle Donne, we add the Botanical Garden of Rome, the Zalib bookstore, Spazio Scena, some galleries – formal and informal – of the neighborhood, and, exceptionally, a location across the Tiber: the Auditorium Parco della Musica, which will host a very special event.
The number of partners is also growing – among them, foreign embassies and cultural institutes, local institutions and private entities – listed elsewhere in detail. However, it is worth noting, alongside the historic collaboration with the Archivio Luce, the important support of the CSC – Cineteca Nazionale, which from this year sanctions a significant convergence between the three main film libraries in the capital. A synergy that confirms how strategic it is for institutions committed to the preservation of audiovisual heritage to support a festival that promotes
its knowledge and enhancement through creative reuse.
For the AAMOD community – and archives and film libraries more generally – however, it is not just about creating a container capable of showing the world’s most important reuse productions, discussing them, meeting the authors, and growing a community of enthusiasts. Of course, the Festival is first of all this, a “found footage carousel,” precisely. Some may experience it as a Ferris wheel, others as a roller coaster, for still others it will be like a ride on the tagadah… For us in the Archives – and the archives – it is instead above all a House of Mirrors, where, as we enter, we discover ourselves reflected in so many unexpected ways: elongated, squashed, magnified, fragmented, kaleidoscopic… sometimes truly unrecognizable.
A place in which to lose oneself and then try to recognize oneself. And in this getting lost and finding oneself, try to understand what it means to be an Archive of the Present and what its function in contemporary society and culture might be.
Luca Ricciardi
Concept and managing direction
Flaming cinema
In search of unprotected explorations we set off with the third edition of UnArchive. Once again this year a subversive cine-path, from the understanding of the archive as a restless place of preservation, therefore a cavern that enhances the living dimension of its treasures, in the co-habitation of rebellious materials. We move (from) the archive as a powerful design space, for unconventional re-assemblages, where the experience of different knowledge cohabits the possible in act. If we want, archive as a privileged place for those practices of recherche-création that are so widespread in other countries and that, also in Italy, are entering the roster of the possible – in universities, academies, festivals – to build constellations of meaning and original research capable of holding together theoretical awareness and risk of the artistic gesture. A scenario rich in potential that the Festival traverses and stimulates, with acts that privilege the living and relational dimension of images, in the construction of alternative memories and histories.
Enriched with new arborescences-from the Botanical Garden to the Spazio Scena, all the way to the Auditorium, in one of this edition’s highlight evenings-Unarchive is in full germination, fertilized by moist gazes, pregnant with emotions. Nourishing blooms, living matter for films, panels, meetings, performances, cine-concerts, in a genetic exchange of components alien to stabilized cinema. Cinema mutates, Unarchive records, then displaces, unbrands and induces new transformation. The degeneration of matter seen as opportunity asks us to embrace dissolution, uncertainty, the very idea of passage in composing other images. An enhancement of entropy that has to do directly with the idea of indiscriminate life, with artists/directors escaping from established narratives to offer us rebellious connections of filmic matter, mixing and lapping born of photo-detritus, surveillance images, ancient ruins or reduced formats inadmissible to great cinema. The unserviceable becomes living matter, the collectors of filmic junk geniuses diviners in search of new iconologies. Physical scraps that evoke cultural marginalization, exposed bodies, yes, even those of increasingly resilient female authors able to escape the form of classical writing to invest their magical cine-dances with new meanings, playful and political. We are dreamy. We are open to gestures of anger and gestures of love that liberate new imaginaries, territories of unstable, crazy, visionary thinking. UnArchive is the fertile garden for these red poppies.
Thus come to UnArchive the ardent and surprising visions of authors from different latitudes who offer us glimpses of distant landscapes and bodies that offer themselves to our eyes as battlefields. The battle is one that found footage images fight to unearth forgotten identities and to rewrite histories, even of the recent past, starting precisely from the interrogation of filmic representations. Romanian director Andrei Ujică, an exceptional witness to the collapse of the Iron Curtain with his epochal Out Of the Present, brings his latest film Twst and is the protagonist of a masterclass organized in collaboration with CSC Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia.
Some guests already known to UnArchive audiences return, including Bill Morrison, a 2025 Oscar nominee in the Short Documentary category with his Incident (already awarded in the first edition of the festival). This year Morrison brings his floating images to accompany a string ensemble for Darker Cineconcert, by composer David Lang. Also in the live performance section we host visual artist Federica Foglia who presents her expanded version of Orphan Film Grafts in dialogue with the sound trio Faravelli-Malatesta-Ratti.
In competition we find again Palestinian Kamal Aljafari, already the protagonist of an exciting meeting with the audience last year, as well as Polish Tomasz Wolski and Romanian Radu Jude, with new works of their own. Alongside these established filmmakers, as well as Belgian Johan Grimonprez and Polish Maciej Drygas, we discover younger filmmakers, such as Canadian Lawrence Côté-Collins, Armenian Tamara Stepanyan, Czech Klára Tasovská, Paraguayan Juanjo Pereira and Filipino visual artist Khavn. The competition also includes international short films while Panorami Italiani hosts Italian works by authors who, among others, have long “frequented” the archive in their filmmaking practice, such as Parenti-D’Anolfi and Sara Fgaier. The Frontiere films take us from China to Portugal via Iran, Palestine, Algeria, Bosnia… The international dimension of the review is also manifested in the connections that Unarchive has activated with counterpart festivals in other countries, of which we present some selections.
Marco Bertozzi, Alina Marazzi
artistic direction
www.unarchivefest.it
segreteria@unarchive.it
06 5730 5447