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Join the ACTIVATE Seminar on Alternative Media Archives
22/09/2025
Alternative Media Archives: Challenges of longue durée research and preservation practices
ACTIVATE WP4 Hybrid Seminar 2 Location: UNIL – Anthropole – Room 2013 (Thursday) and 4021 (Friday)
To register for online participation please write to secretariat-histoire@unil.ch, subject ACTIVATE, and indicate your name and institutional affiliation. Registration deadline: October 17, 2025
October 23, 2025
1:30 p.m. Welcome (Oksana Sarkisova & François Vallotton)
2:00 p.m.–3:45 p.m. Panel 1 / Alternative Media Archives
- Frédéric Deshusses (Archives contestataires, Genève) Diaspora media and legal deposit of printed works (dépôt légal des imprimés): When private archives fill the gaps in public conservation policies
- Özge Çelikaslan (Center for Advanced Internet Studies, Bochum) Living Commons, Fragile Infrastructures: Rethinking Alternative Media Archives through bak.ma
- Krzysztof Wasilewski (Koszalin University of Technology) Alternative Local Magazines as Social Archives: The Case of Kwartalnik Drezdenecki [online]
BREAK
4:15 p.m.–5:45 p.m. Panel 2 / Archival knowledge transfer and dissent in Eastern Europe
- Anna Nakai (Tokyo University of Foreign Studies) Editorial Activism as Transnational Knowledge Transfer: The Case of Poland Monthly in 1980s Japan [online]
- Giulia de Carlini (Bologna University) “Other” Memories: Creation, Management and Preservation of GDR Feminist Archives (1987-2023) [online]
October 24, 2025
9:30 a.m.–11:15 a.m. Panel 3 / Multimedia Archives: Preservation and Exhibition Strategies
- Nicola Hellmann-McFarland (Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung, Bonn) Preserving Archival Films: Strategies for Mitigating Deterioration and Embracing Digitization [online]
- Anna Hodel (Basel University) Alternative Archiving and Practices of Remediating in Contemporary Queer Art of the South Caucasus
- Eszter Nagy (freelance audiovisual designer, Budapest) What can archiving citrus wrapping paper teach us? An alternative mode of preserving cultural heritage [online]
BREAK
11:30 a.m.–12:45 p.m. Panel 4 / Internet Archives and New Digital Challenges
- Alexei Chumakov (University of Manchester) Archiving Resistance in Real Time: Telegram and the Russian Opposition in Exile (2016–2025)
- Antonino Sciotto (University of Piemonte Orientale) Networks before the Internet:The Cybernet Archive
12:45 p.m.–1:15 p.m. / Concluding discussion
A first hybrid ACTIVATE seminar was organized at La Contemporaine and focused on the questions of the audiovisual archives’ role in the politics of preservation and presentation of countercultural, alternative media. With this second seminar—offered to consortium members and anyone else who is interested in—co-organised by the Cinématheque suisse, the University of Lausanne, and CEU/Blinken OSA Archivum, we further extend theoretical reflection and aim to present a range of case studies related to the challenges of archiving media activism from both a long-term and transnational perspective. Titled Alternative Media Archives: Challenges of Longue-Durée Research and Preservation Practices, the seminar will discuss theoretical approaches and archival collections embodying the entanglements of social transformation initiatives with the development of alternative media or alternative media ecosystems.
For further project details please visit activate-horizon.eu
