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.
The Ambassadors also presented the zine ‘’The Dreaming Behind An Archive’ edited by Dominique Vincent with contributions from her fellow Ambassadors Anna Osarose, Ariana Barnes, DK Nwosu, Eileen Ggagbo, Ibiwunmi Balogun, Kimberly Johnson, Lloyd Curtis and Monalisa Chukwuma; alongside a preface from Project Manager Tamera Heron. You can read the zine here and click here to find out more about the event.
Undocumented: A Framework for Community-Led Black Screen Heritage Practice:
Drawing on two years of activity in partnership with The New Black Film Collective, this publication shares the project’s approach, outcomes and learning from working with Black communities to preserve, contextualise and celebrate Black home movies. It explores trust, shared authority, care-centred practice and community expertise, alongside practical considerations for organisations developing similar work.
Undocumented was made possible thanks to the support of the BFI National Lottery Screen Heritage Fund, awarding National Lottery Good Cause funding.