FIAT/IFTA World Conference 2026

This proposal explores the consonance between the Social Technology of Memory (TSM) and the Design Method for Project and Resignification of Museum Spaces (MDPREM) as decolonial tools for audiovisual heritage management. The research investigates the Brazilian territory of Serra Pelada, a former gold mining camp historically stigmatized by extreme industrial extractivism. Instead of traditional top-down archiving, this approach transfers curatorial autonomy to marginalized communities, specifically focusing on former miners and local residents. By integrating TSM's active listening with MDPREM's pillars, the methodology transforms silenced narratives into active instruments of narrative justice. Ultimately, the project demonstrates how emotional design and social museology can redefine community-based archives as spaces of equity and dialogue. In Serra Pelada, the methodology guided the rescue, cataloging, and digitization of 417 historical audiovisual media from a local filmmaker, empowering 17 residents as "Guardians of Memory". Furthermore, the community implemented basic audiovisual preservation processes, including strict digitization standards and differentiated copies for both preservation and access. This initiative proves that true archival sustainability requires the emotional and political engagement of those who inhabit the territory, constituting a practical example of community audiovisual preservation models. Aligning with the conference theme "Screen Memories in Dialogue", this presentation reveals how marginalized groups can deconstruct structural erasure through self-representation. We conclude that the decentralization of audiovisual heritage is a fundamental step toward healing historical traumas and shaping inclusive futures.

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.

Television historians inevitably have to contend with gaps when examining the audiovisual archives of broadcasters and preservation institutions, especially when searching for records from the medium’s early decades. However, this is a communication technology — and a domestic device — whose development has enabled audiences themselves to engage in practices of capturing and archiving content, a dynamic that has expanded significantly in the online environment.


Today, many TV fans make use of collective digital video-sharing platforms to upload recordings of old programs, originally captured on VHS tapes or DVDs. Some of these users have become known for this type of activity, at times receiving audiovisual materials from professionals who once worked behind the scenes in television. Not infrequently, clips made available by these fans are also used in contemporary productions focused on the careers of television personalities. Even the disputes between these viewer-archivists and active TV networks — dissatisfied with having recordings of their productions shared by third parties — ultimately attest to the recognition achieved by these fans, who are transformed into “professional-amateurs” as they demonstrate competencies related to the history of television in Brazil.


This paper discusses how the archives of viewer-archivists, as well as fandom practices attentive to past content made available by TV channels on their over-the-top platforms, have contributed to the preservation and narration of Brazilian television memory. Although fan archives are shaped by a curatorial dynamic guided by personal taste and affective investments, they constitute important sources for researchers due to their potential to house records that are no longer present in the broadcasters’ own archives. Moreover, fans dedicated to monitoring the streaming catalogs of TV networks shed light on the very archiving dynamics adopted by media conglomerates over time, revealing continuities, gaps, and reconfigurations in the criteria used for the preservation of television archives.

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.

This piece explores how the Madeja Archive was created and how it has developed over time. Madeja isn’t just any archive, it’s a dynamic, evolving collection housed within the Fundación de Arte Contemporáneo (FAC) in Uruguay. It all began in the early 2000s, driven by a genuine sense of urgency among artists and curators. They noticed that fragile audiovisual works from the late ’70s onward, recorded on U-Matic, VHS, Betacam, MiniDV, Hi8, and even film, were slowly deteriorating and at risk of disappearing forever.
But Madeja was never intended to be a cold, neutral storage room. From its inception, it was political, personal, and even a bit defiant. The archive emerged from moments when artists and curators discovered their own work decaying on shelves or realized that no one in Uruguay was supporting the preservation of independent audiovisual art. There were no public policies, no safety nets. Madeja approached preservation not only as a technical solution, but as a form of care, a gesture of resistance against being lost or erased.
Time operates differently within Madeja. It isn’t a neat, linear timeline. Each piece in the collection carries at least three layers of time (each layer occurring decades apart): 1. the moment the artist created it, 2. the moment it joined the archive, and 3. the moment someone revisits it to reuse or reinterpret it. Madeja preserves everything: tapes, boxes, handwritten labels, curated playlists, notes from the era. It isn’t just about digital files, it’s about maintaining the complexity and context of each object and the web of relationships around it. The archive ends up resembling a tangled skein (a “madeja” in Spanish) where different eras, technologies, and emotions are intertwined.
This presentation situates Madeja at the heart of important discussions about memory, media archaeology, and the ecological politics of digital preservation. It examines what happens when data exists within fragile environments, or when issues of power and funding (or the lack thereof) determine what survives. By emphasizing collective authorship, marginalized voices, and activist modes of archiving, Madeja understands memory not as a finished narrative, but as something always evolving. It’s about creating room for future curators, artists, and educators to keep these works alive and relevant, regardless of how much time goes by.

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.

The panel proposes a reflection on preservation and access to films made by women in Brazil, focusing on short films. Nayla Guerra presents a survey of a filmography she compiled, comprising 222 short films directed by 121 women during the Brazilian military dictatorship, and analyzes the importance and challenges involved in recovering these works. Often regarded as a format of less cultural, social, and historical importance, short films tend to receive less attention and are frequently overlooked when decisions are made regarding preservation, restoration, and access initiatives. Many of these works are lost, damaged, or available only in analog formats, making access to shorts made by women during this period particularly difficult.
Next, Carolina Vergotti presents a study on the preservation of these 222 shorts, including the conditions of the films in the Cinemateca Brasileira’s collection, analyzed using the methodologies adopted by the institution. The diagnostic aims to demonstrate the gaps in the collection, the risks faced by some of these films, as well as possible paths for the preservation and access to these works for restoration, research, and diffusion.
Finally, Patrícia Machado introduces a recent initiative she has been leading for the digitization and expanded access to these works. She presents a platform created by her project that provides what she calls the “biographies of films”, making information about the production contexts of these films, how they circulated, which archives hold them, and their preservation conditions accessible. The project also involves digital preservation and access to films that remain forgotten or are undergoing deterioration.
By combining theoretical and practical perspectives, the panel aims to draw attention to the gaps in the representation of women within archival collections and to present possible actions for recovering these works and, consequently, the contributions of women to the history of cinema.