The Otolith Group’s “Monuments to Dead Television.” Independent Cinema and the Migrant Experience in Europe between Television and the Museum

Authors

  • Beatrice Ferrara Università degli Studi di Napoli "L'Orientale", Napoli, Italy

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.5195/cinej.2013.78

Keywords:

The Otolith Group, EU television archives, museums, identity and migration, attention economy

Abstract

“Monument to dead television” is the expression the British collective The Otolith Group uses to define its activity of recuperating long-lost quality films, and re-screening them in contemporary art museums and gallery spaces. What these films share is a cinematic vocation and a complex approach to the question of memory and migration in Europe, and to the role of images as testimonies or documents. This essay explores The Otolith Group’s interest in such forgotten archives of modern television in order to unearth their significance for contemporary museums today.

Author Biography

Beatrice Ferrara, Università degli Studi di Napoli "L'Orientale", Napoli, Italy

Beatrice Ferrara (PhD in “Cultural and Postcolonial Studies of the Anglophone World”, 2011) teaches Media and Cultural Studies at the Università degli Studi di Napoli “L’Orientale” (Italy). Here she is also Local Project Manager and Appointed Researcher within the EU Project “MeLa* - Museums in an Age of Migrations” (FP7). Her research interests include sonic-cultures and cyber-cultures of the black diaspora; theories of affect and post-representation through images and sounds, especially in relation to race; the relation between image, sound and pre-emptive power. She has published several essays and articles in international publications. She is the editor of Cultural Memory, Migrating Modernities and Museum Practices (Politecnico di Milano DPA, 2012).

References

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Published

2014-04-08

How to Cite

Ferrara, B. (2014). The Otolith Group’s “Monuments to Dead Television.” Independent Cinema and the Migrant Experience in Europe between Television and the Museum. CINEJ Cinema Journal, 3(1), 47–74. https://doi.org/10.5195/cinej.2013.78

Issue

Vol. 3 No. 1 (2013): Fall 2013

Section

Articles

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