Performances of Cinema and Other Infrastructural Musings

In the first of the Come Closer Archive Sessions, speakers Megan Hoetger and Amal Alhaag were invited to reflect on their ongoing engagements with ‘ephemeral gatherings.’ As active researchers and curators, Hoetger and Alhaag put focus on the archiving of these temporary points of contact rather than on objects, drawing out different possible answers to the question: How can the archive do justice to the intangible, referring to the use of a place? Based on her extensive archival research around the filmmakers’ cooperatives of the 1960s and 1970s, Hoetger’s talk, entitled “Performances of Cinema and Other Infrastructural Musings,” examined the choreographies of the film screening site. In it, she zoomed in on the event space of the screening (the audience, the location, the circulation of the invitation) and the politics of its organisation. Alhaag, conversely, looked back on her own work with as co-founder of the Amsterdam-based initiative Side Room, which was active from 2013 to 2016 and was a space that centered informal gatherings and relationships built therein.

In 2022, Oude Kerk, Amsterdam began developing its own archive as an “open archive⁠⁠(opens in a new tab)⁠.” The project began from the question: much of the city’s oldest building has been recorded and researched, but how could the more recent history of the church, with temporary large-scale interventions by contemporary artists and a program of performances and concerts, be added to this? The Come Closer Archive Sessions opened this process up to the public, as well as colleagues and people with an interest in archival practices.