Discussions, regulations, and protocols to guide sustainable development in archives are often championed by professional associations and widely disseminated online, in-person meetings, and forums. Many of these global standards, best practices, and green sustainable practices are easier to implement in technologically advanced countries and more challenging in those with unequal economies, political instability, long histories of colonization, and neocolonization.

This paper calls attention to the need to move away from the convenient and homogeneous division of the global north / global south to understand specific contexts of sustainability work by audiovisual archives in Latin America and the Caribbean.

The discussion focuses on research practices, recycling, and equipment repurposing as key aspects of promoting green archives. Illustrating specific examples of research leading to the fabrication of AD stripes, archival supplies, and adapting telecines to scanners yields a discussion of intrinsic characteristics of archival institutions to engender a more fair and informed dialogue with contemporary global efforts to foster and support green archives.

Kelas Liarsip collective’s first project traces the work and life story of Indonesia’s pioneering woman film director Ratna Asmara (1913 – 1968). It was initiated with the support of public broadcasting platform for arts and culture Indonesiana TV.

This project expands the acknowledgement for women’s works in the moving image heritage. Since Indonesia’s publicly funded film heritage program was initiated in the form digitisation and restoration in 2014, only ONE work from women directors was included. Ratna Asmara’s ‘Dr. Samsi’ (1952), the subject of this research, is the second one.

The documented numbers of women directors remained below 2 percent within the moving image industry. This scarcity is very much reflected in the silences and absences in the archives. Due to lack of recognition, their works are left with minimal attention and care, leading to advanced chemical decay. The erasure of their traces progresses slowly and steadily over decades of limited civic spaces to research history – following decades of military regime’s censorship which is being revived by the country’s newly elected administration.

In this presentation, Kelas Liarsip will share a reflection of this collaborative project. Tracing Ratna Asmara provides a chance to question this erasure and explore methods of overcoming it. This research looks into the margins of established archives and searches through non-institutional sources. To study Asmara’s work approaches, Kelas Liarsip created digitisation and restoration workflows for 35mm film elements found in Jakarta, Indonesia. Acknowledging limitations of locally available technological resources, collaborative approaches were developed by moving image archivists and post-production technicians, mindfully using digital workflow in creating access copies and restoration. The process was documented in a series ‘Devising Ratna Asmara’ which was co-produced by Indonesiana TV, facilitating the assembly of a women-led creative team.

Suspilne Ukraine, Ukraine’s public broadcaster, safeguards around 70,000 reels of film across different cities, all at risk of destruction due to ongoing attacks. Thanks to the collective efforts of international partners –SRG SSR, Swiss Solidarity, Swiss UNESCO Commission, ALIPH – International alliance for the protection of heritage, Institut national de l’audiovisuel, European Broadcasting Union (EBU)– it has been possible to acquire a professional film scanner for Suspilne.

In the Indian entertainment market, competition between television, online streaming content and film is fierce. With managers reluctant to put money where it cannot grow exponentially, broadcast archives of studios are a rarity. As large conglomerates take over smaller media houses, it appears that they are disinterested in preserving their own content, unless it functions as a commodity.

The recent surge in re-releases of older films has prompted studios to scramble for distributor copies for restoration. This is motivated by profit than genuine concern for the film’s artistic or archival significance, highlighting a power dynamic how broadcast data from private studios is valued, influenced by ‘relations of privilege and social control’. (Appadurai 1994).

But small private collectors ardently rescue, safeguard, digitize and archive broadcast collections. Applying the four types of commodities theory by Jacques Maquet (Appadurai 1994) these are ‘ex-commodities’ – materials retrieved from the commodity state and placed in some other state. Broadcast archives of large studios are ‘commodities by destination’- objects intended principally for exchange.

This paper unpacks ‘Everything is possible, and nothing is true’ in broadcast archiving by analyzing the production and archiving policies of two major production studios in the South Indian city of Hyderabad. We ask, what is the cultural and archival value of the content and material when everything is created for consumption, but nothing is deemed fit for retention? We place this treatment next to the meaning-making practices of two private film- related material archives, The Cinema Resource Centre and Archive of Indian Music in South India. With safeguarding their collection and public engagement at the core of their work, we see that individual collectors place immense social and cultural value in preservation and digitization with profits not being their mainstay and collections as ex-commodities.