In my presentation I aim to understand how discourses, sentiments, attitudes and behaviours reminiscent of the historical past take centre stage in the present. Drawing upon current media portrayals on the rise of far-right politics in the Romania, I investigate how archived television pasts can offer orientations amidst present-day phenomena such as populism, polarization and disinformation, questioning thus the roles and nature of archives as simultaneously technologies of the past, present and future.
Starting from the premise that present-day medial portrayals act as ‘repositories of memory’ (Stoler, 2009, p. 49), I will zoom into several instances of recent media portrayals in Romania that reflect both present-day sentiments in the country as well as reference Romania’s historical past. These media portrayals will form the focus of a feminist approach to archival curation (DWAN, 2017). Feminist-inspired archival curation aims to generate new approaches to engaging with existing archives in ways that connect historical archives with present-day political contexts and in doing so, create new archival forms and reimagine existing archival structures. As part of this feminist curatorial exercise, I will place the selected instances of audiovisual media in conversation with historical archival documents on Romania’s televisual past, so as to arrive at arrive at gaps, omissions and silences in archived historical narratives that are still palpable in the present day.
Using a method that historian Saidiya Hartman (2019) calls ‘critical fabulation’, I aim to open up the potentialities of archival knowledge and provide a demonstrative show-and-tell of what a reconfiguration of archives as technologies of the past may look like and what new imaginaries are prompted through that exercise of reconfiguration.
