STIMOLA CURIOSITA’, PASSIONE E CORAGGIO
SAFE - the SustainAbility of italian Film hEritage: Archival Infrastructures, Digital Preservation, Stewardship Strategies
Descrizione
During the twentieth century, film archivists learned how to deal with film preservation (Brown 1952, Volkmann, 1965). Nevertheless, it is only since the early 1990s that a growing body of literature has laid the basis for an advanced conservation science. This has led from latemodern, cyclically renewed “urgent preservation” policies and requests, to an approach based on collections' sustainability and long-term survival (Nishimura 1993; Gamma Group 2000; D. Nissen et al. 2002; J-L. Bigourdan, 2002). As a direct consequence, the last decade has seen a growth in the building of new state-of-the-art and designoriented film storage vaults and preservation centres across Europe (Archivio Cinema Friuli Venezia Giulia, 2008; New Nitrate Archive, Danish Film Institute, 2008 ; Nitrofilmdepot, Filmarchiv Austria, 2010; BFI, Master Film Store, 2011; Eye Collection Centre, 2016; Cinémathèque Suisse Research and Archive Centre, 2019), in the attention to the sustainability of film storage in the global south (Nikolaidou, King, Coley 2021), and into the climate monitoring of several longstanding archival film vaults (such as the recent technical study of the Cineteca Nazionale and Archivio Storico LUCE vaults in Rome, narrowing down the focus to the Italian context, Venturini 2022). Furthermore, since the early 2000s, the growing amounts of digital objects and platforms, and the marketdriven obsolescence of carrier-based formats has obliged more and more attention to be paid to digital preservation sustainable practices related to film digitization and digital access of both analog- and digitalborn film materials (Edmondson 2016; Prentice, Gaustad 2017; Jarczyk, Kromer, Pfluger and Niederhäuser 2019). On these premises, “sustainability” is not only an environmental issue and ambitious societal goal but also a key-term that is reshaping many fields. The discussion can thus be furthered to all the logics by which film and media production, circulation and preservation organize their own “resources”, be them hardware or content-related, laborers or consumers’, human or non-human. The sustainability of media can be measured through an “infrastructural approach”, focusing on short-term marginal and local practices or on the longstanding maintenance policies through which socio-technical systems are kept “alive” (Parks, Starosielski 2015; Krebs, Weber 2021). The awareness that “we are never looking solely at media” (Mattern 2015) but dealing instead with a complex of human communities, tacit knowledges and techno-cultural assemblages, calls also for a deeper understanding of gender, race, class, labour, geopolitical inequalities, and to which extent they are implied in the archiving, access and distribution of resources and data. Moreover, a different perspective, a re-thinking of the proliferation and accumulation of images may raise questions on the cultural and ethical sustainability of affective visual ecologies (Shaviro 2010; Ivakhiv 2013; Weik von Mossner 2017) and of state of saturation of the current iconosphere (Fontcuberta 2016). Therefore, the project, focusing on the sustainability of Italian film and digital-born flm heritage, will have three main aims: a) assessing the overall infrastructural sustainability of the main Italian film storage vaults and preservation centres; surveying the state-of-the-art of film digital preservation in the same national area; collect and share stewardship strategies able to re-thinking a sustainable curatorship and an inclusive sociocultural, affective and narrative access to the Italian film heritage and cinema history and to exchange and share archival and historical and scientific knowledge within an ethical, transnational and transcultural framework.
Partenariato
- Università degli Studi della Tuscia
Importo del progetto
Importo totale del progetto Euro 127.000,00
Importo del progetto Uniud Euro 127.000,00
Finanziamento Uniud Euro
Durata
- Data avvio progetto: 30 novembre 2023
- Data conclusione progetto: 29 novembre 2025
Link
https://www.mur.gov.it/it/atti-e-normativa/decreto-direttoriale-n-1409-del-14-9-2022