Delphine Seyrig and her Legacy

Symposium: Between Cinema and Video Activism

Inspired by Delphine Seyrig’s video activism, academics, curators, archivists and video makers, including Ros Murray (King’s College London), Giovanna Zapperi (cocurator of Defiant Muses: Delphine Seyrig and the Feminist Video Collectives in France in the 1970s and 1980s at the Museo Reina Sofía, Madrid), Nicole Fernandez Ferrer (Centre Audiovisuel Simone de Beauvoir) and Pascale Obolo (director and artist) look at video and feminism in France and the UK from the 1970s to the present day.

 

Filmmakers, curators and academics will look at Seyrig’s legacy and contemporary feminist video practice, activism and archiving in France and the UK. Following two strands – firstly, video activism; and secondly, archives, curating and dissemination – participants engage with a series of questions relating to the use of video and other alternative formats as a political tool.

• What do we mean by video activism today?
• What are the legacies of the portable video technologies that were taken up by feminist movements in the UK and France in the 1970s?
• What are the role of archives in preserving activist video projects, and what possible archival futures can we imagine?
• How do we curate queer and feminist video practice?

 

1.00pm -1.40pm PANEL 1: Introducing Seyrig and video activism

Azadeh Fatehrad (Leeds, Herstoriographies) and Ros Murray (KCL, Herstoriographies): Welcome and introduction

Catherine Grant (Birkbeck, Film Studies for Free): ‘Delphine Seyrig, Videographically’

 

1.40pm -2.40pm PANEL 2: Queer and feminist video curation practice

Selina Robertson (Club des femmes, Birkbeck) ‘Millions like us: remembering through practice queer feminist film curation as activism in 1980s London’

Giovanna Zapperi (Université François-Rabelais, Tours, curator), ‘Feminist Constellations. On curating an exhibition on Delphine Seyrig, feminist collectives, and video in France’.

 

2.40pm – 3.00pm Break

 

3.00pm – 4.30pm PANEL 3: Working with video archives I

Sandi Hughes (Rewind fastforward) introduces us to the Rewind Fastforward project

Ed Webb-Ingall (writer and filmmaker, The London Community Video Archive): On All You Need’s An Excuse and archive reactivation

Ash Reid (Cinenova, Goldsmiths) and Charlotte Procter (Lux, Cinenova), ‘Circling Cinenova’

 

4.30pm – 5.00pm – Break

 

5.00pm – 6.00pm PANEL 4: The Benefits of Feminist Video: preservation and distribution (from Les Muses amusement to the Centre Audiovisuel Simone de Beauvoir)

Pascale Obolo (filmmaker, curator and editor of Afrikaada) ‘The black body beyond a living archive’

Nicole Fernandez Ferrer (Centre Audiovisuel Simone de Beauvoir) on feminist video activism at the Centre Audiovisuel Simone de Beauvoir

 

£10, members £8, students £5

1pm – 6pm

Organised in partnership with