FIAT/IFTA World Conference 2026

This presentation would be a review of a season delivered at the BFI entitled, Constructed, Told, Spoken: A counter history of Britain on TV, which retraced the establishment of Multicultural TV Units at the BBC, ITV, and Channel 4, in March 2026. My season told a chronological story of how this unique British phenomenon in television programming came to be, defining this timeline as a movement in television non-fiction. 


In this presentation, I intend to tell the story of the emergence of multicultural programming, illustrate how the season brought together a range of voices, and shed light on the conditions for establishing these units and the programming they provided for minorities in Britain. I will detail the archives I worked across and trace the emergence as it unfolded throughout the season.


The timeline is as follows: it began with the emergence of the BBC's immigrant programmes unit in the 1960's. Followed by a period of institutional absence for multicultural policy, during which anti-racist television was developed externally by activists and found a place on our screens through open-access slots in the 1970s. By the 1980s, a defined institutional lane had begun to emerge, peaking in the middle years with a clearly articulated political and social positioning grounded in community perspectives coached in this institutional voice. Ultimately, the season traced the movement's progression toward its eventual decline and the phasing out of multicultural units in the early 2000s.


My presentation will show the programmes and the development of this political and social position, as mirroring diversity in Britain, how it functioned as a counter-narrative to the news and how its preservation and rediscovery through the archive reframes this period.

RTÉ Archives has, for many years, developed meaningful partnerships with cultural institutions, community organisations and memory networks across Ireland and the Diaspora. Central to this work is a commitment to meeting communities where they are, recognising that meaningful engagement with audiovisual heritage happens both in physical public spaces and online environments that people already use and trust. Through collaboration with museums, libraries, cultural centres and creative community initiatives, RTÉ Archives is able to open the collections of Ireland’s public service broadcaster in ways that cannot be achieved alone, supporting engagement and dialogue across all island of Ireland and diasporic contexts.
Aligned with FIAT/IFTA’s 2026 theme, “Audiovisual Memories as Spaces of Dialogue”, the presentation illustrates how cross‑institutional and community partnerships enable audiovisual archives to function as dynamic civic resources. Working across physical public spaces, online environments and specially designed, curated applications, these initiatives demonstrate how innovative uses of audiovisual archival collections can support inclusive dialogue and meaningful engagement with shared histories across different communities, sectors and generations.

As concern mounts regarding the global climate crisis, the environmental impact of audio-visual archiving has been widely recognised as an urgent concern. Thus, it has become vital that archival institutions critically reflect on their praxis, their responsibility to the environment and to memory, and their narration of archival loss. In dissecting this, a pervasive tension is revealed between the professional aspiration for permanence and the stark reality of precarity. Unfortunately, this dialogic gap remains underexamined, particularly in the public-facing contexts where archives construct their identities. In response, the project at the heart of this presentation investigates how permanence, visibility and ephemerality are narrativised and communicated publicly by six FIAT/IFTA member institutions. Through a systematised audit of accessible catalogues, official communications, mission statements, websites, and social media presences, our goal is to better understand how these archives represent their purpose, negotiate discourses of loss, and make themselves visible (or invisible) in the digital landscape. 
This year marks the 5th and 10th anniversaries of two devastating fires at the Cinemateca Brasileira facility (2016 and 2021). With the FIAT/IFTA conference being held at an institution so familiar with archival loss, we feel it is both poignant and necessary for a discussion of permanence, visibility and ephemerality to hold a powerful presence in this space. Further contextualised by an increasingly critical climate reality and a plethora of rising geopolitical tensions, we also believe that in 2026, the notions of loss, legacy and mortality are more palpable than ever. In turn, the recent emergence of high-concept ultra-long-term media storage technologies, such as DNA-based data solutions, provides a stark contrast. As mass-digitisation projects and novel experimental technologies tease the potential of more permanent futures for cultural memory, we propose to initiate a dialogue between the institutions at the very heart of these debates.

Since 2023, the Caracol Television audiovisual archive has been working on the technical verification and digitization of its 16mm film collection. This includes more than 3,000 newsreels and program rushes that remained unseen or unrecognizable for generations of viewers for over 50 years.
In partnership with the Faculty of Arts at Javeriana University, we have been working on an unprecedented process: digitization using a Gugusse Roller, a "handmade" technique that has allowed us to uncover images of our country from the 1960s and 70s. With the support of visual arts students, we have begun a training program that encompasses all stages of working with this type of material: verification, preparation, digitization, digital preservation, and licensing for creative projects.


This presentation will not only describe the details of the process but will also highlight the use of open-source technology to overcome the lack of a scanner. In addition, we will reflect on the importance of creating pedagogical processes for creative uses of the archive in our context.

The National Archives of Singapore (NAS) holds one of Southeast Asia's most significant collections of audiovisual heritage — spanning audio recordings, video, and film, including uniquely Singaporean collections such as the Educational Television Series (ETS), a collection of home movies documenting everyday life, and SoundscapeSG — an irreplaceable record of the nation's sonic environment.

Managing digitisation across three format domains, each with its own technical requirements, presented a considerable challenge: how to establish standardised workflows without losing the specialist expertise each format demands.

A particular focus will be placed on the film workflow, developed in close collaboration with NAS archivists. Their domain expertise shaped workflows that are sensitive to the specific preservation challenges these materials present.

Another challenge is posed by a subset of donated materials that had suffered considerable decay under tropical climate conditions before reaching the archive — requiring workflows flexible enough to accommodate varying states of preservation.

This presentation describes the collaboration between NAS and Cube-Tec, a specialist provider of digitisation workflow software, to implement a unified solution covering audio, video, and film. Speaking from both perspectives — archive and vendor— we trace how the project unfolded: from requirements analysis and workflow design to practical implementation.

We also look ahead: how the workflows at NAS point towards scalable, future-ready approaches and the integration of emerging technologies for sustainable digitisation practice.

This presentation discusses the activation of audiovisual archives through pedagogical and creative practices developed in the Audiovisual Production Workshops at FGV CPDOC (Brazil), which completed ten years in 2024. The workshops are based on one of the largest collections of personal archives in Latin America and promote the production of short films using archival materials as both source and medium.
Since 2023, the workshops have been part of the project “New Perspectives on the Archive: Visuality, Circulation and Education in Women’s Archives” (FAPERJ/CNPq), focusing on women’s histories and the critical re-reading of archival collections. Through a practice-led approach, participants engage with archival documents not only as historical evidence but as material for reinterpretation, montage, and narrative construction.
The presentation examines selected films produced within this framework to explore how archival images are reactivated through editing processes that negotiate between institutional constraints, creative agency, and pedagogical goals. Particular attention is given to the tensions between technical, aesthetic, and ethical dimensions of archival reuse, including issues of visibility, silencing, metadata limitations, and representational bias.
By situating the classroom and the editing room as spaces of research, the paper argues that audiovisual practices can transform the archive from a site of preservation into a dynamic field of interpretation and circulation. In this context, montage becomes a critical operation that not only re-signifies images but also challenges dominant narratives, especially in relation to gender and the historical marginalization of women in archival systems.
The case study highlights how collaborative filmmaking processes can expand archival access, generate new forms of public engagement, and reposition audiovisual archives as active agents in the production of knowledge.

Based on the preliminary survey of the film holdings of the Museu da Imagem e do Som de Campinas (MIS-Campinas), this paper discusses how audiovisual archives within safeguarding institutions are currently strained by material deterioration, technological obsolescence, and new digital regimes of visibility. While photochemical and magnetic formats preserve traces of documentary, educational, amateur, and dissident practices that expanded democratic horizons of audiovisual culture, their survival is threatened not only by physical decay but also by exclusion from contemporary systems of description, circulation, and intelligibility. In this sense, the audiovisual archive is understood not as a mere repository, but as a space of arkhē: an instance of origin, consignation, and power in which it is decided what may be remembered, accessed, and activated in the future.
The research combines survey, identification, cataloguing, cleaning, and remapping of the film collection, approaching these procedures as critical practices of mediation and legibility. The case of MIS-Campinas makes it possible to question the position of local and regional archives in the face of the urgent need to preserve obsolete media while simultaneously building archival networks capable of connecting collections, communities, researchers, and public policies.
The paper argues that the future of these collections depends not only on digitization, but also on safeguarding policies, critical metadata, mediated exhibition practices, and cooperative infrastructures capable of resisting algorithmic standardization and the marginalization of non-hegemonic repertoires. From this perspective, MIS institutions may be rethought as polymorphic museums: hybrid spaces in which archive, exhibition, education, and community are articulated as forms of material, symbolic, and political resistance.

[This session will be in Portuguese. Simultaneous translation will not be available.]

PAVIC – Audiovisual, Iconography, and Content Researchers is a Nationwide, a nonprofit professional association in Brazil. We were established to raise awareness of and give proper recognition to the research professionals working in cultural, artistic, educational, and entertainment markets.

Founded in January 2022, PAVIC brings together 196 research professionals. As an association, one of our key missions is to promote and strengthen this professional field, as well as to drive improvement and efficiency in the production processes within the audiovisual and cultural sectors, which directly enhances the quality of the final products.

In the audiovisual field, research professionals preserve the memory of the entire production process for films, series, and soap operas. This includes details about the raw materials—such as images, sounds, or characters, which is especially vital when dealing with archival materials.

In ongoing collaboration with audiovisual archive institutions, researchers actively engage in processes of reuse, reinterpretation, and cultural mediation of media collections, helping to preserve and celebrate this important memory.