Paper short abstract:

Aby Warburg's 'Mnemosyne Atlas' was an inspiration to conduct ethnographic fieldwork at the British Film Archive through photographic images. How does an organisation arrange its visual heritage and what are the politics of memory?

Paper long abstract:

The 'Mnemosyne Atlas' by Aby Warburg is an unfinished attempt to map the pathways that give art history and cosmography their pathos-laden meanings. Warburg thought this visual, metaphoric encyclopedia, with its constellations of symbolic images, would animate the viewer's memory, imagination, and understanding of what he called 'the afterlife of antiquity'. Using a similar technique, this paper investigates the meandering pathways of the British National Film Archive (bfi) in regard to the conservation, circulation, and hiding of images. With a new future project to 'unlock cultural heritage' (2013-2017), the bfi aims at digitising parts of their archive while keeping celluloid images as 'originals', however some films may never be seen by the general public nor by researchers. Here the invisibility of visual memory becomes a contradiction in itself. Also, how does a film archive deal with the legacies of an industry that by its nature has always been transnational? Arjun Appadurai's metaphor of media flows might be a useful way to describe the flow of images, film, and voices in an archive. The presentation is illustrated with still photographs taken since 2011.