World Conference 2022

Recordings Vol.7

World Conference 2022

The FIAT/IFTA World Conference 2022 was held in Cape Town, South Africa. It was FIAT/IFTA’s first conference in the African continent and the organisation’s first in-person event since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic.

To celebrate a World Conference to remember, we will be publishing recordings from a curated selection of the sessions from Cape Town. New videos will be available every Friday until the start of the FIAT/IFTA World Conference 2023.

This week’s presentations were given by Claude Mussou from INA, titled “Final Account, Third Reich testimonies: An archival and production project”, Daniela Floris & Margherita Sechi from RAI, titled “Traces of the perception of the female world in Italy in public television: cues for potential educational studies for gender equity”, and by June Pok & Cassandra Tang from the National Archives of Singapore, titled “Who Says Archives are Boring? The National Archives of Singapore and Speaking the Language of Children”.

Final Account, Third Reich testimonies: An archival and production project

by Claude Mussou

INA

Final Account, Third Reich testimonies: An archival and production project

Final Account: Third Reich Testimonies is both a production and archival project initiated and directed by Luke Holland (ZEF Productions Ltd,) in association with University College London (UCL), the Wiener Holocaust Library, the Institut National de l’Audiovisuel (France) with the support of Founding Partners and Pears Foundation.

Final Account as a documentary film was directed and produced by Luke Holland (1948-2020). It is based on the testimonies of last living participants in the Third Reich’s war crimes. The film premiered at Venice International Film Festival in September 2020, a couple of months after Luke Holland died.

In parallel to the film production process, an archive was built which contains life story interviews conducted by Luke Holland between 2008 and 2017, with men and women in several countries, including Germany, Austria, France, the Netherlands, Belgium, Paraguay, Argentina, Romania, Spain, and Ukraine. The intention was to revive their memories of, and involvement in, Nazi Germany, the Holocaust, and the Second World War. It comprises 295 filmed interviews, around 500 hours, with 274 men and women born between 1905 and 1934, mainly Germans and Austrians, who occupied a range of positions on a wide spectrum of responsibility. Their interviews trigger reflections on responsibility, complicity, and justice, of ‘ordinary’ people who were implicated in, witnesses to, or on the periphery of war and genocide.

The archival collection Final Account: Third Reich Testimonies is accessible for purposes of research, education, and memorialisation at the Institut National de l’Audiovisuel (INA), UCL, and the Wiener Holocaust Library on behalf of ZEF Productions Ltd.

Claude Mussou, Head of INA thèque

Claude has been coordinating the services that accompany and trigger academic usage of INA’s archive for several years. Along with several colleagues at INA, she has been developing the Lab program after she graduated from a dedicated Executive Master in Digital Humanities (SciencesPo, Paris).

Traces of the perception of the female world in Italy in public television: cues for potential educational studies for gender equity

by Daniela Floris & Margherita Sechi

RAI

Traces of the perception of the female world in Italy in public television: cues for potential educational studies for gender equity

There is a lot of talk about gender equality with regard to the social position of women. In Italy there is a feminicide emergency, and a lot is being done to achieve equality, also in the working world. Even if the situation is improving, this goal still appears, to some extent, quite far away. The problem is first of all cultural and comes from afar.

The RAI Archive offers important evidence on how TV has approached women, in programmes explicitly dedicated to women, but also and especially in programmes in which they are not the chosen subject of the investigation, but emerge as an involuntary presence, regardless of the topic.

There are many traces, over time, of how television has, even unconsciously, but following deep-rooted social conceptions, recorded the female world, women’s relations with society, family, work, health and the opposite sex. These testify an undoubtedly patriarchal culture, as well as a growing awareness, also by the media, that something had to be changed. These multiple traces, if effectively rendered, could be used for educational purposes in schools, but also in workplaces, where there seems to be still a long way to go in terms of women’s rights.

Our presentation, far from claiming to be explanatory or exhaustive, aims to be a cue to show the potential research opening up, starting from programmes which were not specifically dedicated to the subject under investigation, whatever it may be.

A vast television archive like this, if questioned by experts such as sociologists, psychologists, researchers in the field of custom history, with scientific methods and aims, can provide material of high importance, visually supporting possible causes of many phenomena related to women in the present society.

Daniela Floris, Archivist and supervisor of quality control in audio-video documentation & Margherita Sechi, Official in charge of TV Archive in Milano

Graduated in literature/ethnomusicology at La Sapienza University, Rome, 1990.
Documentator and archivist at Rai Teche since 1992.
Responsible of the archiving methodologies and of the quality control and certification of the documentation of the TV programs of the daily flow and of the historical heritage. Responsible for the portal of Teche related to the Italian Folklore Archive. In 2019, I attended the FIAT/IFTA conference in Dubrovnik with the presentation “Historical-geographical Documentary in RAI”. In 2017 I attended the IASA conference in Berlin sith the presentation ” Historical-geographical Documentary in RAI “Archiving the Rai collection of traditional folk culture”.
Since March 2019 member of the FIAT/IFTA Media Studies Commission.

I am a Rai Teche archivist, for the Italian broadcaster RAI Radiotelevisione Italiana.

My activity has developed over time through the documentation of audiovisual material, the analysis, and adaptation of TV archives in the transition from text archives to their evolution in multimedia form.  I am also a Supervisor for Quality Control Documentation and a specialist researcher on archives. In 2019, I attended the FIAT-IFTA conference in Dubrovnik with the presentation “Making accessible cultural heritage” to celebrate the centenary of Fausto Coppi’s birth. Since October 2017, I’m in charge of the Rai Teche TV archive area in Milan, which today also includes a large photographic archive. Since this year, I have been a member of the Fiat-Ifta MMC committee.

Who Says Archives are Boring? The National Archives of Singapore and Speaking the Language of Children

by June Pok & Cassandra Tang

National Archives of Singapore

Who Says Archives are Boring? The National Archives of Singapore and Speaking the Language of Children

The National Archives of Singapore (NAS) has always been active in connecting with the community, with a full calendar of public talks and programmes for the young and old. The Covid-19 pandemic, however, upended everything. Because of restrictions in group sizes and activities permitted in the Archives, the NAS had to re-examine its outreach efforts from 2020.

In response, the NAS revamped its suite of offerings by creating online programmes which include introducing children to the work of the Archives. These programmes were specially designed to intrigue and excite young minds such as a ‘day in the life of a conservator’ experience.

The NAS will share its outreach efforts and reveal how it continues to educate members of the public about Singapore’s history and heritage in fun and novel ways. Learn how the NAS worked around the challenges of Covid-19 restrictions to bring their signature children’s programme into homes during the height of the pandemic, and how conservators quickly pivoted back to in-person programmes for children once safe distancing measures were eased in 2021.

June Pok, Assistant Archivist, and Cassandra Tang, Assistant Conservator

June Pok is an Assistant Audiovisual Archivist with the Audio Visual Archives department. She was previously part of the Outreach team, where she helped to organise and run children’s programmes at the National Archives of Singapore and Former Ford Factory.

Cassandra Tang is an Assistant Conservator at the National Archives of Singapore. Apart from carrying out conservation treatments for historical records at the Archives Conservation Lab and supporting the collections and exhibitions at the National Archives of Singapore, National Library and the Former Ford Factory, Cassandra also supports Outreach efforts.

World Conference 2022

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