Archives of the commons

Digitised in 2021 by the Arsenal Filminstitut, in collaboration with the Harun Farocki Institut, following a long period of obscurity, On Africa was made by American film-maker, visual anthropologist and teacher Skip Norman in 1970 following his graduation from the German Film and Television Academy in Berlin, as part of its first graduating class, along with other figures such as Harun Farocki, Hartmut Bitomsky and Holger Meins.  

On many levels, On Africa is a film of substitution. Norman sought to document the liberation struggle against Portuguese colonialism in Angola, yet, as the colonial authorities blocked his arrival in Luanda — for lacking a permit to film, by all accounts — the crew recorded and edited the film in West Berlin. The intricate material history of its shooting goes some way to explaining the complex formal fabric of On Africa and its high level of reflexiveness. The film is dialectically structured by two vectors, aligned and breaking with, respectively, the anti-colonial film canon from that period in history. On one side, a didactic vector, developed through the re-deployment and montage of colonial and anti-colonial archive photographs, accompanied by an ensemble of voiceovers which start by elucidating the workings of colonialism, before presenting, and listing, African anti-colonial liberation movements. And on the other, an experimental vector, developed in two narrative segments noteworthy for their high degree of experimentation and counter-ethnographic scope. Thus, the travellings on Kurfürstendamm, one of the major arteries of old West Berlin — shot in 16mm and black and white and formalising a movement of rotating the gaze — are rendered as negatives to grant visibility to the spectral dimension of the infrastructures of the old metropolis. Furthermore, the sequence of archive photographs from the Berlin Conference (1884–1885) not only reconstructs the history of the modern colonial system, but also confronts German society with a mirror — no longer opaque — of its own colonialism. On Africa sustains the spectral dimension of certain urban symphonies which, upon manifesting a “disdain of the mimetic”, a phrase by American theorist Annette Michelson in reference to Dziga Vertov, divert the dominant perceptive and cognitive model. More than a manifesto on the politics of colonialism and anti-colonialism, On Africa is an affirmation of an expression and a tool of decolonialisation from the sphere of representation.

Morgenkreis (Morning Circle, 2025), by Basma al-Sharif, a film-maker of Palestinian origin, transposes the counter-ethnographic spectral gaze of On Africa to the enunciative present as it travels through the logistical infrastructures of Berlin, and its lines of transit and post-modern architectures. As well as revealing the layers of history, these infrastructures embody post-Ford capitalism, while their figurations evoke Germany’s hand in various genocides, including genocide in Armenia, to whose diaspora the characters belong. This film, shot in 16mm, questions the biopolitical devices of German society through the stark gaze and voiceover of the police interrogator, as well as the desecration of the kindergarten morning circle, an important disciplinary mechanism in modern nation-states introduced in nineteenth-century Germany. If the circle here is motif and form, then the film is also traversed by the dialectic of presence-absence, central to Palestinian poetry and film, by forms of absence that become forms of presence in the media-circulated images of genocide in Palestine.  

In dialogue with a genealogy of the film analysis practices of “war inscriptions”, Control Anatomy (2024), by Palestine film-maker Mahmoud Alhaj, also unfurls mechanisms of desecration, here in the reconstruction of Israeli colonialism in Gaza by way of images that document the evolving military technology of occupation and genocide. Their redeployment coincides with the opening of a sensitive counter-shot through the sound plane, inverting the non-reciprocity between the gaze of the observer and the gaze of the observed — the dominator is symbolically subjected to the gaze of the dominated.

Directed by Mustafa Abu Ali with the Palestine Film Unit, a militant film collective founded in 1968, Scenes of the Occupation from Gaza (1973) documents the Israeli occupation in Gaza after the Six-Day War. The film maps the biopolitics of colonialism, framing them against anti-colonial resistance as an emancipatory infrastructure. It also breaks from the militant film canon as it generates, through montage, images of thought encompassing actions of resistance in the film syntagm. Here too, formal experimentation is a tool of decolonisation in the sphere of representation.  

Filmed collectively by Sana na N’Hada, Flora Gomes, José Bolama Cubumba, Djalma Martins Fettermann and Josefina Lopes Crato two years after the declared independence in Guinea-Bissau in 1974, O Regresso de Amílcar Cabral (1976) documents a ritual of mourning: the transfer of the mortal remains of Amílcar Cabral, assassinated in 1973, from Conakry to Bissau. The film shows the importance of cinema, teaching and the construction of emancipatory infrastructures in the anti-colonial leader’s political-cultural project. Its spectral dimension, explored by Filipa César and strengthened by re-employing modes of archives, situates it beyond the naturalism of representation to reflect the contiguity between the visible and the invisible of vernacular cosmologies — “We, the Africans, firmly believe that the dead carry on living by our side; we are a society of the dead and the living”, Cabral said. O Regresso de Amílcar Cabral is a key film for thinking what cinema is, and what it can be, in times of fascism and genocide and reflects on the delicate balance between information and invention. 

Resonance Spiral (2024), co-directed by Portuguese film-maker Filipa César and Bissau- Guinean architect and film director Marinho Pina, converses with history, memory and audiovisual forms of the liberation struggle in Guinea-Bissau, expanding the performativity of film; namely, its capacity to change the real. Continuing work to compile and digitise the anti-colonial archives of this African country, started by César in 2011, Resonance Spiral accompanies, and fosters, the process of constructing the Mediateca Onshore, in Malafo. Located in the geographical centre of Guinea-Bissau, this horizontal emancipatory infrastructure of teaching and community was founded by the film-maker Marinho Pina and his partners and houses a media library and sound archives on the anti-colonial struggle. Not only does the film return anti-colonial archives into circulation, thereby creating a living archive beyond the category of “archive”, but it also makes the principle of circulation its formal driving force. The modes of horizontal and vertical montage, with the mutual permeation of visual and sound elements, give presence to the liberation struggle and affirm a cyclical conception of time and revolution, of which spirals and spiralling archives are forms of expression. 

Ways of Seeing (1972) is one of the most revolutionary television series on art history, the museum and contemporary critical culture. Across four episodes, an articulate, enthusiastic John Berger unpacks the relationships between classical art through the gaze and new technology, the nude and feminism, the oil painting and commodity fetichism, advertising and consumerism. In essence, a level of critical commitment only comparable to its capacity for dissemination. Unsurprisingly, the series, and the book that would distil it, continues to forge vocations. This session sees art historians Alberto López Cuenca and Modesta Di Paola carry out an analysis of Berger’s audiovisual work, placing the stress on episodes one and four of the series. In the first episode, Berger reflects on the connection between the act of seeing, looking and being in light of new technology, such as the film camera. At the same time, it analyses how the culture of reproduction is turning paintings into messages or fragments of communication while stressing the importance of silence when observing historical paintings. In the fourth and final episode, he introduces advertising as a new iconic-verbal language that shares certain principles with the message of oil painting as a luxury item.   

The session opens with the premiere of a filmic letter from Isabel Coixet, one of Spain’s most internationally acclaimed directors, to John Berger, with whom she maintained a long friendship and deep admiration. The short film is testament to the ubiquitous and long-lasting presence of the author of Ways of Seeing, even after his death in 2017.

The conference On Your Screen: Art History and the Museum Facing the Audiovisual Challenge sparks debate around the transformations of art history and museum space upon embracing the audiovisual format. Its starting point is John Berger’s emblematic television series Ways of Seeing (1972), a landmark in the democratisation of art-historical discourse. In the series, Berger illustrated how the transfer of a work such as Goya’s Los fusilamientos del 3 de mayo (The Third of May 1808 or the Executions) from museum gallery to home TV screen completely changed the viewer’s experience, allowing the image to travel to straight to the viewer.

In the twenty-first century, this screen-based ecosystem has expanded exponentially, with museums not only physically integrating screenings and devices into their galleries— following in the wake of many exhibitions on the moving image — but also deploying complex virtual strategies. Equally, numerous en vez de a multitudeof historians, students and creators use digital platforms to circulate their ideas and projects. This audiovisual shift opens access to ignored materials and democratises knowledge, as well as challenging traditional hierarchies and the interpretive authority of institutions. The conference, promoted by the research project ATLAS AV: The Audiovisualisation of Art History and the Museum, seeks to analyse this vast audiovisual material, its archives, and its capacity to transform the memory of art.