The festival Archival Assembly #1 marks the (temporary) conclusion of the five-year project „Archive außer sich“, a series of interdisciplinary research, presentation, and exhibition projects dealing with film cultural heritage and its archives. Participating institutions are Harun Farocki Institut, SAVVY Contemporary, pong film, silent green Film Feld Forschung, the International Short Film Festival Oberhausen, and the masters program “Film Culture: Archiving, Programming, Presentation” at the Goethe University Frankfurt. From September 1 to 8 film archives and film archival projects will meet for a public exchange. At the same time, the plan is for a festival that will take place biannually, understanding archival work – as well as the cinema – as an artistic, social, and political practice.

"Some of them hold to the idea of the national legacy (or genre, or historical time period), others are resistant to such ideas. Some of them are easily accessible as state archives or are closed off to the world, others have never made any inroads at all into the writing of film history. Archives and counter-archives: It seems as if neither can do without the other. But when film archives are seen, not as closed entities, but as the setting for negotiating a transnational practice, forming new alliances, perhaps the old idea of so-called 'world cinema' can shake off its power structure, allowing us to rethink both, the world and the cinema." (Stefanie Schulte Strathaus)