Screen Heritage Ambassador Programme
Please note, applications for the programme have closed
London’s Screen Archives and The New Black Film Collective’s Undocumented project seeks to address the lack of Black home movies within film archives. The project aims to create a space where we can discuss the importance of celebrating and preserving the Black experience in London and highlight the crucial role screen archives play in preserving stories from the past.
For our second year, we ran the Screen Heritage Ambassador programme which was a series of workshops for Black Londoners to learn about digitisation, non-western archiving, cataloguing and programming. The aim was to create a cohort of skilled community ambassadors who can continue to be custodians of screen heritage and memory work through audio-visual archives.
Ambassadors have had the opportunity to have their own home movies digitised, preserved and acquisitioned into LSA’s own collection with contextualisation written by the cohort themselves.
Participants have gained skills and knowledge in:
- Community archiving
- Non-western archival techniques
- Digitisation of video and film formats
- Cataloguing
- Archiving personal collections
- Film formats
- Programming with heritage material
The workshops
These sessions entailed:
- An Introduction
- Caring for your personal collection
- Community on camera, viewing your own home movies
- Correcting our Collecting – Thinking beyond the ‘traditional’ archive
- Visiting R3store Studios
- Identifying what is missing in the archives
- Non-western cataloguing
- Cataloguing your archive
- Programming your event
- Exploring legacy
Custodians of the Archives: Shaping Our Future Histories
The second year of the programme concluded with an event curated by the Ambassadors who over the course of 9 months explored the practice of persevering, cataloguing and digitising Black home movies.
The day titled ‘Custodians of the Archives: Shaping Our Future Histories’ took place at BLOC, Mile End and focused on exploring archive as an active practise in forming our identities, it also featured the premiere of ‘Custodians’ by Monalisa Chukwuma which responded to the learnings and reflections of Undocumented. Click here to find out more.
