Living Archive – The Catalogue

The catalogue presents a new and unique access to the archive of the Arsenal – Institute for Film and Video Art, which sets new standards in dealing with a film collection. 37 artists, performers, curators and scholars were invited to develop their own perspectives in dealing with the archive and to implement and present their projects. For two years, the Arsenal archive was the starting point for the multi-perspective approach of participants hailing from USA, India, South Africa, Israel, Brazil, Jordan, Britain and Germany. This produced an endless variety of projects: retrospectives of Soviet, Chilean, Spanish and Cuban films; the reappraisal of Riki Kalbe and Ludwig Schönherr's oevre; a cinema of decolonization; a cross-sectional analysis of the year 1978; KEYwording – the importance of keywords for the functioning of an archive; an archeology of cinema or a program on cinematic explorations of national identities.