Women and Invisible Labour: Re-Imagining the Archive

This workshop offers to reflect on archives as sites of contested knowledge, and to envision avenues and methodologies to open them to more inclusive decolonial and feminist perspectives. Dr. Lola Rémy examines how the archives of experimental filmmakers rest on the invisible labour of their wives and daughters, whose affective work is rooted in kinship and care. Her presentation reflects on how a mixed methodology of close archival research and oral history can recentre archival margins and rewrite a history of film more inclusive of women’s diverse and central roles. Varda Nisar reflects on the notion of archives itself within the context of Pakistan, and how social media platforms provide community and grassroot movements a space to counter military regimes. Understood as countervisual sites that challenge the master-narrative of the nation-state, her presentation brings forth examples of these emerging archives and how they have become spaces of both record-keeping and of critical pedagogy. Together, these presentations bring attention to the gendered labour that goes into building archives and how oral testimonies and interview can offer an alternative reading of these institutions. 

Register to this event. This workshop is part of the Fall 2024 program of the Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling (COHDS) and Acts of Listening Lab. 

Varda Nisar (she/her) is a mother, daughter, and sister. She is also a doctoral candidate in Concordia’s Department of Art History and Public Scholar (2022-23). Her work diverges in several directions, including art education, community outreach and art education. During her time in Canada, she has consistently tried to foreground the work of artists from Pakistan and South Asia. In 2021, she convened a speaker series titled (Art+Micro)History: Contemporary Artistic Voices from the South, which drew attention to artistic modes of resistance in Pakistan. In 2023, she co-curated a multi-venue exhibition, “re*  imagining / créer / building / faire / mapping / connaissance /…” She was a 2015-16 Arthink South Asia Fellow and worked with Spark Arts for Children as part of her secondment. Her current research draws attention to cultural production under military regimes in Pakistan, particularly focusing on museums and archives.  

Lola Rémy (she/her) is an FRQSC postdoctoral fellow at McGill University, Montreal. She completed her PhD at Concordia University in the Mel Hoppenheim School of Cinema. Her project is an oral history that recenters women’s affective and gendered labor in experimental film archives. Her work on archives as sites of cultural encounters, racial and gendered violence, and reappropriation by communities and artists has appeared or is forthcoming in The Canadian Journal of Film Studies, Frames Cinema Journal, NECSUS European Journal of Media Studies, and Synoptique, An Online Journal of Film and Moving Image Studies. She is one of the 2024-25 Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling Scholars-in-Residence.