Heritage institutions are currently trying to diversify national historiography by including narratives of ethnic and social minorities. This practice coincides with the digital turn which allows museums and (film) archives to remediate parts of their collections onto digital platforms. The recognition of specific groups, however, is not an easy task. Having to deal with government directives, the somewhat problematic legacies of collection policies and cataloguing practices, the lack of metadata as well as legal and ethical issues are but some of the challenges film archives are currently facing. At the same time, practices of recognition and the resulting visibility are ambivalent, as Johanna Schaffer (2008) and Tanja Thomas (et al, 2018) argue.

This talk will draw on some of the findings of my research project “The Cultural Heritage of the Moving Image” (VR). My paper will outline some of the archival strategies of including ethnic and social minorities into the audiovisual heritage of the nation when curating access to digitized collections. Examining the website “filmarkivet.se”, run by its main content-providers the Swedish Royal Library (KB) and the Swedish Film Institute (SFI), I will look at the politics of recognition at work, will outline its ambivalences, and will suggest ways of how to acknowledge diversity without ending up in closed identity positions.