Program

Friday October 3
Decentring the Archive

11:00-11.30    Opening

11:30-12:00    Introduction
Olexii Kuchanskyi, Clea Wanner, Philip Widmann

12:00-13.30    Session One
Carolien Damiens: Far from Moscow: relocating and indigenizing Soviet cinema history
Nino Dzandzava: Tracing the Archives of Mikheil Chiaureli
Moderation: Clea Wanner

13.30-15:00    Lunch

15:00-16:30    Session Two
Oksana Sarkisova: Cine/Map Rules: Revisiting Early Soviet Travelogues 
Matthew Vollgraff: Antireligious Propaganda and the Ethnographic Museum in Soviet Cinema, 1928–1932
Moderation: Olexii Kuchanskyi

Saturday October 4
Reapproaching the Archive

10:00 -11:30   Session Three
Philip Widmann: Re-cinefication: Interventions into material and epistemic absences using non-film sources

11:30 -12:00   Coffee break

12:00 – 13:30 Session Four
Doplgenger (Boško Prostran): What are these old rags still good for?

13:30-14:30    Lunch

14.30-15:30    Closing discussion

Please register to receive the workshop reader via Oleksii Kuchanskyi or Clea Wanner.

Decentring the Archive: Screenings and Conversations

Venue: neues kino, Klybeckstrasse 247, 4057 Basel 

How can the legacy of socialist cinema be re-actualised in the anti-colonial struggles of today? How can perspectives from beyond the center be (re)activated — as fragments, counter-narratives, or acts of critical reappropriation? The invited artists and researchers approach the cinematic heritage as a space of contemporary inquiry, political tension, and poetic imagination. 
The event combines screenings and discussions of filmmaking strategies of engaging with archives: from addressing the history of Russian colonial conquest of Siberia to following the perplexing routes of a love story whose traces vanish between Łódź, Morocco, and Israel, via the feminist reclamation of cinematically constructed imperial vision of Soviet Central Asia. 

17:30-19:00

• Where Russia Ends, Oleksiy Radynski, UA 2024, 25’, OV/e
• Whose Voice is This?, Dana Iskakova, GER/UZB 2024, 14’, OV/e
  With Dana Iskakova, Lyuba Knorozok and Olexii Kuchanskyi

19:30-20:30

• Miraculous Accident, Assaf Gruber, DE/AT 2025, 29’, OV/e
  With Assaf Gruber and Philip Widmann