Patricia Zimmermann, Charles A. Dana Professor of Screen Studies and Director of the Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival, has been appointed to a multi-year, multi-disciplinary international curatorial and research team in Lisbon, Portugal for 2023-2025.
Entitled TRAÇA (“moth”), the project curates programs of Portuguese home movies influenced by and rooted in Lisbon’s territory. It also conducts research into postcolonial issues.
As the TRAÇA project contends, home movies have been a longstanding blind field in cinema history and theory. Traditionally, they were left out of the archives (in 1993, it was estimated that only 1% of homes movies had been preserved since the beginning of film production). Home movies open the possibility for new methods and new materials for the writing of history, especially in offering a counter-history.
The project collaborates with Arquivo Municipal de Lisboa – Videoteca [Video library of the Municipal Archive of Lisbon] to operate a longitudinal cut in the archive to investigate the unconscious life of culture, analyzing landscape, space, territory, and gesture in circuits of collective imagery and memory.
