The theme for this festival is ARCHIVE!
Why ARCHIVE, and why is this political?
We have initiated this festival as a place of discussion and action. Any film you watch, or any artwork you see displayed, was created in its own context and gets to be shown in certain social relations. The artists that were selected for this festival were conscious of this, and their works’ social impact continues beyond this event.
For this reason, the topic of ‘archive’ felt right to us - archives are not just crucial to anthropological research, they are powerful political tools, and not always for good. Anthropology as a discipline itself is deeply marked by the rigorous, objectifying, non-consensual archiving of colonial researchers. For this reason, this festival is intended as a place to question who it is that creates archives, why they create them, how they can be subverted, and how new archiving can be used for radical social change.
CLICK ON THE ARROWS TO THE SIDES OF THE SCREEN to browse photos
Workshop with Gian Sanghers-Warren
Intro to the film showcase with Arti Siudem
Installation by Emelie Victoria
Workshop with Rizky Rahad
Workshop with Gian Sanghers-Warren
Videography by Orlando Myxx
Installation by Adza Tarka
Mudlarking field trip with Ricardo Leizaola
Workshop with Gian Sanghers-Warren
Performance workshop with indexthumb
Workshop with Rizky Rahad
Installation by Emelie Victoria
Taking a multimodal approach to ethnography has been central to our vision. All workshops hosted and installations featured at our festival take experimentation seriously. Inspired by digital tools, queer movement theory, decolonial practices and more, the artists use material cultures such as textile and sculpture, and the body itself, to challenge the notion of ‘archive’.
With them, we question what archives can be, consider how to subvert violent archival practices, and explore alternative approaches to archiving that are based on collective care.
ACTIVITIES:
Thames riverbank as Archive: a guided walk to Rotherhithe Beach
field trip
Ricardo Leizaola 
Restaging Queer Archive as Collective Care
workshop & film screening
Rizky Rahad
(Qamerad Collective)
Faux Expressionism: Simulation, Movement and Embodied Archivism
talk & interactive workshop
Gian Sanghera-Warren
The Context of KONTEKST
talk
Centre for Visual Anthropology (Lee Douglas) & KONTEKST collective (Arti Siudem, Emelie Victoria, Sam McNeil, Sana Nurlan).INSTALLATIONS:
KONTEKST COMMUNITY NOTICE BOARD
Curated by festival guests 
MAIN FILM SHOWCASE:
BLOCK 1: UNEARTH
To unearth, to pull from the ground, to uncover and expose.
Why are some things covered? Should they remain so? Who has the power to unearth, and when should they? This first block focuses on archives in the making, the revealing act itself as a refusal to be unheard.
These artists are generous enough to add to and question current renderings of history, that in violent ways tend to silence groups of people. They help us re-construct the story of how we got here by using everything from reinterpreted family archives or observational film to performance and fiction.
BLOCK 2: WARP
To warp, to shift, to take what is there and re-present it anew.
This second block looks at how alternative archives can be suggested and violent archives subverted, and with them the power structures that those archives are born from.
By tapping into methods like desktop documentary, multimodal translation and counter-mapping, these filmmakers inspire action and suggest that things are usually more than what they seem.
FATAL TIDE
by Akinsola Lawanson
