“Let me illustrate this with reference to the part of the world where I live – the Southeast Asia/Pacific region… It’s home to half a billion people – a twelfth of the world’s population. Does it also have – should it have – a twelfth of the world’s preserved moving image heritage? How does it rate in world terms?”
— Ray Edmondson, “Archiving Outside of the Frame” (2000)
If Ray Edmondson raised this question decades ago, then this year’s Global Audiovisual Archiving (GAVA) Conference feels like an ongoing dialogue in response to that question. The year’s conference program was an invitation to scholars, artists, historians, and archivists, collectively decentralizing our view of how to organize audiovisual archiving and reflecting the experience of the region within its region.
Quoting Filipino scholar Bliss Cua Lim’s words, “poor archiving must be defended rather than patronized,” as the opening speaker of the conference, Lisabona Rahman shed light on the reality of limited resources, lack of access to digitization technologies, and the need for specialized labor in frameworks outside of Europe and North America.
Yet the question she ultimately posed was not simply about these limitations themselves, but about something more fundamental. Considering the discursive activity of global audiovisual archiving often happens in Europe and North America, where infrastructure is made available, Rahman encouraged the audience to ask how those infrastructures came into being in the first place. What has enabled them to remain sustainable?
Thinking like this carried over into the subsequent panels, Bridging Archives and Academia: The State of Affairs of Collaboration in Audiovisual Heritage. Particularly, four questions Rahman raised in this session enhanced the contour of this year’s conference theme even sharper.
- How can we learn from those unstandardized archiving?
The thinking about Bliss Cua Lim’s poor archiving invited us to dissect the provenance of those technical standards and recommended practices in audiovisual archiving. Rahman pointed out that standards reflect the society where archives are located or practised, and their sociopolitical context in their infrastructure. And all of these are organically connected and formulated. The non-institutional or communal practises also reflect its society. It actually shows how communities of care make up for the absence or inadequacy of support or infrastructure. How can we make it possible to acknowledge these practices as valid knowledge and practice?
- How do we maintain a circular movement of knowledge production?
If archives and academia are serious about diversifying knowledge production, how can we move beyond treating practices outside Europe and North America as complementary case studies? How can we recognize these practices as legitimate sources of archival theory, involve their practitioners as knowledge producers rather than research subjects, and ensure that the knowledge generated returns to and benefits the communities from which it came? Rahman further introduced an inspiring work from an Aotearoa scholar, Linda Tuhiwai Smith, who advocates active involvement of the people being researched as the subject whose knowledge is valid, and who has the right to also join the process of developing their knowledge.
- What can we learn from institutions located in places like Bangkok, where the temperature is high and humid?
- Consider the large portion of archival studies on this region that are done by scholars outside the region; how can we ensure academic studies and training are better supported within the region?
Centering on the formation of standards and our knowledge, this talk not only craftily packs the power dynamics and struggle into the issues at hand but also challenges the very foundations of our knowledge and the structures upon which it is built.
Source of Documentation:
The 3rd Global Audiovisual Archiving (GAVA) Conference was held at the Thai Film Archive on 15 June 2026.
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