Founded by Ceridwen Dovey & Rowena Potts in 2022, the Archival Futures Collective
makes experimental films about human and more-than-human relationships to nature
on Earth and off-Earth, inspired by the research materials and collections
of museums, archives, libraries, and cultural institutions around the world.
We call ourselves the Archival Futures Collective because we believe that archives are a repository of ecological memories that can be reanimated and repurposed to say something meaningful about our present world and its possible futures.
Underpinning our work is:
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A collaborative creativity that lets us put archival media into poetic conversations about the health and well-being of on and off-Earth environments, ecologies and climates.
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A conviction that archives can be respectfully deployed to tell stories from perspectives that often differ radically from the time in which the material was first produced.
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An effort to illuminate evolving relationships between the human and the more-than-human, between living organisms and the environments that support them.
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A desire to make video art that generates powerful, sometimes unnameable emotions, ranging from delight to discomfort.
THE ARCHIVAL FUTURES OF OUTER SPACE FILM QUARTET
This quartet of short experimental films explores ethics and emotion in outer space. They are designed to be screened together, but each film is also being screened in film festivals, museums and cultural institutions in Australia and internationally.
MOONRISE ​(2021, 11 minutes)
The Moon’s surface may soon be subject to permanent human occupation. Do we want to stand by silently as irreparable damage is done to our sister satellite? What might happen if we listened to what the Moon has to say?
MUSCA (2022, 5 minutes)
A visitor from another planet wonders about the human practice of naming star constellations after particular things.
MEMORABILIA (2023, 16 minutes)
A daughter mourns the loss of her father, a passionate collector of space memorabilia, as she falls under the sway of the 'flown' space objects in her inheritance.
REQUIEM (2023, 16 minutes)
Real astronauts who have spent time on the International Space Station or Mir Space Station (including Dorin Prunariu, Soyeon Yi, Claudie Haigneré, Paolo Nespoli, and Cady Coleman) perform a sonnet cycle that laments the imagined future loss of the ISS when it is deorbited within the next decade. Parts of it will burn up in the atmosphere, and the rest will end up in pieces on the ocean floor at Point Nemo, the spacecraft cemetery in the remote Pacific.