03 Feb Archival Creation: Discussions and practices
3
Feb
23
Mar
Archival Creation: Discussions and practices
- Formation longue durée
Monday February 3, 2025 - Sunday March 23, 2025
12 am
Main Film
2025 Rue Parthenais #301, Montréal, Quebec, H2K 3T2, Québec
With Chantal Partamian, Moïa Jobin-Paré, Razan AlSalah, Mathilde Capone, Miryam Charles, Yen-Chao Lin, Muhammad ElKhairy, Nicolas Renaud and Eve Tagny
Application deadline : Wednesday January 15 2025 at 11:59
Cost for the participants : $190
Total training time : 19hrs (9hrs of meetups + 10hrs of group work)
In person at Main Film’s office
Through Compétence Culture ‘s Intervention Compétences program and with the financial support of the Quebec government, Main Film, dedicated to independent filmmaking, pursues its mission of supporting emerging filmmakers
GENERAL INFORMATION
We will be organizing 3 artistic meetups to discuss and reflect on archival based filmmaking: personal, contemporary and historical.
Following these meetups, a weekend of creation based on found/created archives will be organized to put into practice the different reflections and approaches discussed during the previous exchanges.
Each participant will then have the opportunity to conceptualize an archival based work.
This course will enable participants to master the following key elements:
- The different approaches to using archives
- The roles of archives in artistic practice: aesthetic, social, political, informative, historical, etc.
- The personal impact of archives
- Creating your own archive
- How to integrate archives into your work
CONDITIONS OF ELIGIBILITY
This course is open to 8 people only.
It is addressed to self-employed media arts workers living in Quebec.
DETAILED SCHEDULE
Meetup 1 (3hrs) – February 3 2025 – 6pm to 9pm
Reactivating archives
Razan AlSalah, Moïa Jobin-Paré, Chantal Partamian
Archives often hover, sometimes forgotten, and become immortalized in a moment, a hand, a story. In the remediation of personal and public archives, we rediscover our traces and the freedom to give life to bodies, moments, images and stories that have remained in the shadows.
Meetup 2 (3hrs) – February 10 2025 – 6pm to 9pm
Creating your own archive
Mathilde Capone, Miryam Charles, Yen-Chao Lin
In silences, pasts, and hidden memories, archives offer a world of futures in which experimental cinema can flourish and create reimagined forms of existence, life, and presence for communities whose paths are other than linear. In fragments we cross paths. In futures we finally create the voice of our own narratives.
Meetup 3 (3hrs) – February 17 2025 – 6pm to 9pm
Collectivity in counter-archives
Muhammad ElKhairy, Nicolas Renaud, Eve Tagny
Archives are often presented as living in the past, and although they have evolved into the creation of futures, it is essential to the act of collective memory to reappropriate, through archives, what the present might look like. Our histories converge, and thanks to the means of creation we have elucidated in the archives, we listen to each other and tell the counter-history found in the counter-archives.
Creative workshop (10hrs) – March 22 & 23 2025
From research to conceptualization
Participants will have the opportunity to reflect on the concept of a work created from archives, be they personal, public, collective or other.
After an introduction to the process, participants, with their own collected pieces, will explore how to create by combining image and/or sound and/or prose.
Each participant will benefit from 19hours of training (9hrs of meetups and 10hrs of group work).
APPLICATION
Your application must be sent via this form before January 15 2025 at 11:59 :
ABOUT
Razan is a Palestinian artist and teacher based in Tiotiake/Montreal. Her films work with the material aesthetics of appearance and disappearance of indigenous bodies, narratives and histories in colonial image worlds. She often works with sound-images to infiltrate borders that have severed us from the land. Her films are both ghostly trespasses, and seeping ruptures, of the colonial image, that functions as a border, as a wall. She thinks of her creative process as a circle of relations with artists, friends, family, technology, images, plants, objects and sounds…and the unknown. These relations become different points of entry and exit into elsewheres here, where colonialism no longer makes sense.
A filmmaker at the crossroads of animation and photography, Moïa Jobin-Paré has been producing multidisciplinary work since 2015, dedicated to the current image and its hybrid forms, bringing together her great passions: the moving image, pictorial work and sound. She has developed a singular and innovative technique of scratching silver photographs, making exhibitions of them and using them to make short films. Her films have been selected and awarded at numerous festivals here and abroad, including the Annecy Festival, DOK Leipzig, RVQC, FNC, Ottawa’s OIAF and the Ann Arbor Film Festival. From one project to the next, his work has been supported by La Bande Vidéo, the National Film Board of Canada, Main Film and PRIM center, as well as by the Quebec and Canada Arts Councils. Her latest short film, Albums de familles, was produced as part of the Manufacture de films residency at Main Film.
Chantal Partamian is a filmmaker and archivist whose work focuses primarily on Super 8mm and found footage. Partamian’s films have been screened and awarded at numerous festivals, and are distributed by Vidéographe, Groupe intervention Vidéo (GIV) and the Canadian Filmmakers Distribution Centre. As an archivist, she is dedicated to the preservation and restoration of reels from the Mediterranean region ( Katsakh: Mediterranean archives ) while conducting research into archival practices in conflict zones. Her written work is mainly published in Hors-Champs magazine.
A documentary filmmaker and popular education worker, mathilde capone has a master’s degree in social anthropology. A feminist, anti-colonial, lesbian and queer activist, she is involved in collective initiatives that provide food for thought. Her independently produced feature film La fabrique du consentement : regards lesbo-queer was presented at Rendez-vous Québec Cinéma and Image+Nation. ÉVICTION, her second feature, which follows the eviction of a queer housing collective, was unveiled at the Rencontres internationales du documentaire de Montréal, where it won the Audience Award. La maison des rebelles, which follows the opening of Montreal’s first lesbian retirement home / Tiohtià:ke, is her next film.
Miryam Charles is a Haitian-born director, producer and cinematographer living in Montreal. She has produced several short and feature-length fiction films. Her films have been presented at various festivals in Quebec and abroad. Her first feature film, Cette maison, was presented at the Berlinale and the AFI film festival, and was included in the TIFF Top 10 in 2022. She also launched the short film Au crépuscule at the Locarno Film Festival. As producer, she is currently working on the second season of the series Après le Déluge.
Yen-Chao Lin 林延昭 is a multidisciplinary artist born in Taipei and based in Montreal. Having grown up in a multi-faith family, she is interested in religion, spirituality, the divinatory arts, the occult, alchemy, Feng Shui, oral tradition and power – anything that can be felt, but not necessarily seen. A natural history enthusiast and avid collector, Yen-Chao gathers specimens of mineral, botanical, animal and industrial origin, including objects that fix the vestiges of a recent or distant past, with a story to tell. Through intuitive play, collaboration, reclamation and collection, her tactile practice often incorporates various craft techniques, such as copper enameling, ceramics, textiles and gilding, to create experimental installations, sculptures and films.
Muhammad Nour ElKhairy is a Palestinian filmmaker, video artist, film programmer and editor from Jordan, currently based in Tio’tia:ke (Montreal). He holds an MFA in Cinematic Arts from Concordia University. His work has been presented at various international film festivals and art galleries. ElKhairy explores moving images as complex systems with political implications that go beyond mere representation. His experimental fiction and non-fiction videos address the legacies of colonial, political and economic power, examining their impact on individual lives as well as broader social and cultural contexts. His work highlights the screen as an ideological tool and surface for expressing the interplay between personal identity and socio-political realities.
Nicolas Renaud is a visual artist and filmmaker. He is also Assistant Professor and Director of the Native Studies Program at Concordia University in Montreal, where he is a member of the Indigenous Futures Research Centre and the Loyola Sustainability Research Centre. He has been creating documentary and experimental films and installations since the 1990s, including the film La Nouvelle Rupert, which won an award at Toronto’s Hot Docs festival in 2013. He recently exhibited a series of works (2021-2024) inspired by Wendat wampum, and has made several short films, including Florent Vollant : Je rêve en innu (2021) and Holiday Native Land (co-directed with Brian Virostek, Special Jury Prize RIDM 2023). Of mixed Quebecois and Aboriginal heritage, he is a member of the Huron-Wendat First Nation of Wendake.
Eve Tagny is a Tiohtià:ke/Montreal-based artist. Her practice considers gardens and disrupted landscapes as mutable sites of personal and collective memory — inscribed in dynamics of power, colonial histories and their legacies. Weaving lens-based mediums, installation, text and performance, she explores spiritual and embodied expressions of grief and resiliency, in correlation with nature’s rhythms, cycles and materiality. Tagny has a BFA in Film Production from Concordia University and a Certificate in Journalism from University of Montreal. Recent exhibitions and screenings include Henry Art, Seattle; Ames Yavuz and PHOTO Australia, Australia; Murate and Gucci Gardens, Italy; MNBAQ, MAJ, Momenta Biennale, MAC Montréal and Centre Clark, Montreal; VAC, Cooper Cole, Gallery 44, and Franz Kaka, Toronto.
