Long before TikTok, Instagram and selfies, community-scale media-making narrated decades of everyday history on the Greek islands. Amateur filmmakers captured fleeting moments of public and private life, while public access television stations provided a platform for local news, events and creative expression. This parallel session presents the amateur video and broadcast archive of Aigaio TV, a regional public-access television station headquartered in Syros island, Greece functioning between 1988-2009.
Specifically, the session presents methodologies for community based documentation and access of audiovisual material developed during the 2024 edition of APEX, the Audiovisual Preservation Exchange program originating from the Moving Image Archiving and Preservation program at the Martin Scorsese Department of Cinema Studies at New York University. In collaboration with Archipelago Network, a Greece-based nonprofit organization for research and documentation of audiovisual heritage and knowledge in the Aegean region, selected archivists, NYU MIAP Professors and MIAP students worked to exchange knowledge and skills regarding the care of audiovisual materials, cataloging, metadata management, digitization, digital preservation, and access to collections.
Today, accelerating forces such as overtourism and the global climate crisis exert local pressures on the island communities of the Aegean, threatening their cultural heritage and environmental equilibriums. The Aigaio TV archive, which includes broadcasts covering 30 years of Syros island’s history, contains invaluable documentation of current events, political life and society. Collaborative models for cataloging developed over the course of APEX, as well as public screenings organized subsequently with the local community as a form of documenting anonymous/orphan material, provide models for reinterpreting these materials through a contemporary lens and providing access for younger generations of islanders.
