Living Archive

In the framework of “Archival Assembly #1” the digital archive “The Fifth Wall” was launched. The online archive brings together films, reports, announcements, texts, letters, and photos by the filmmaker and editor Navina Sundaram, from her more than 40 years of work in television. The focal point here is Sundaram, a writer with a journalistic approach to her work: on internationalism and decolonization, on questions of class, racism, immigration, and on Indian and German politics. Extracted from the archives of the NDR and WDR as well as from Sundaram’s private archive, “The Fifth Wall” is a curated look at German migration and media history. (Until now, available in German only.)

The symposium The Right to a Public: Working with TV Archives took place in autumn 2020. The presentation of films and television programs by Navina Sundaram, Sohrab Shahid Saless, and Harun Farocki showed the need to work together with broadcasters and other social actors to ensure (public) access to their collections, and the visualization of film history along with it. The historical, cultural, and educational value of the broadcasters’ archival holdings is beyond doubt. “The Right to a Public II” invited representatives of broadcasters, cultural institutions, academia, cinema and film production to an open debate. (The symposium was held in German.)