FIAT/IFTA World Conference 2026

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.