The time has come to reassess the longevity of online exhibition projects. Open access to research data is increasingly required by funding organisations. But apart from ethical and legal considerations such as GDPR there is a risk thato nline collections may become acts of forgetting rather than acts of remembrance. Many become dormant or disappear once their funding ends, and linkrot or platform obsolescence often renders content inaccessible. Archives are uncertain (Thylstrup et al. 2021) and digital preservation remains a myth, being fragile and often unsustainable (Antoniazzi 2021; Pendergrass et al. 2019). That said, digitisation offers access for both users and researchers. And here, I argue, lies the chance for longevity beyond ecological and technological matters. It demands a combination of institutional support, alternative funding strategies, and technological solutions. But above all, it requires a commitment to circulation over storage. This chapter examines the potential for curating the digital collections ofa research archive by studying the Cinema Memory and the Digital Archive (CMDA) website as a digital publication and archival resource.

This chapter examines how film and video archives in the Nordic countries deal with LGBT+ pastsin audiovisual heritage and how they preserve and activate queer cinema. It looks at collection practices and strategies of curating access to archival collections. Queer cinema, a term that canbe used to refer to films by, for, and about lesbians, gays, transgender, and intersex persons, is neither agenre nor an essence. Instead, it refers to queer cinema culture, including its industrial context of production, distribution, and exhibition, as well as the social relations that make it happen (Brunow and Dickel 2018). Queer cinema is not limited to themes, plot lines, or characters. Setting out to challenge normative constructions of gender and genre, of bodies and sexuality, it opens spaces of possibility. The term ‘queer’will therefore be used in the double sense of the concept of queer: on the one hand as an umbrella termfor LGBT+-related film culture (by, about, and for those who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgen-der, non-binary, asexual, or non-heterosexual), and on the other hand as a strategy of ‘queering’ by fore-grounding the norms and power relations embedded in social structures.

As audiovisual archives are the source for historians and curators, it matters whose films are collected, preserved, digitized, and made accessible. Since the “archival turn” in the late 20th century, film scholars and archivists have increasingly viewed archives not just as repositories of knowledge but as active spaces where knowledge is shaped and produced (Brunow 2017; Paalman et al. 2021; Carter 2022). Like other heritage organizations, archives are active agents in forming cultural memory, highlighting certain narratives while sidelining or excluding others. Being acts of remembering and forgetting, archival practices include collection policies, cataloguing with its choice of search terms and other metadata, policies for analogue and digital restoration, enabling access to the holdings, and, eventually, their renewed circulation, both online and offline. Crucially, it is not mere storage but access and circulation that define our “audiovisual memory,” a form of situated knowledge I have described as “the sum of images, sounds, and narratives circulating in a specific society at a specific historical moment” (Brunow 2015, 6–7). Renewed circulation, rather than archival storage, becomes an act of remembering and a way of “activating the archive” (Paalman et al. 2021). Film heritage is not “just there” but actively created, involving various stakeholders, such as filmmakers, archivists, policymakers, curators, and researchers. Therefore, examining archives as knowledge producers is part of a critical inquiry into what has been collected, how it has been catalogued, what has been selected for digitization, and, ultimately, what is made visible—or left unseen. Whose lives and works are collected and preserved in the archive is guided by national frameworks and gendered notions of authorship (Brunow 2017). Moreover, these are inextricably linked to film historiography and its focus on national movements, waves, and auteurs, which tend to sideline the contributions of women filmmakers (White 2015).

This chapter examines the gendered dynamics of archives and databases and their impact on film historiography and cultural memory. It uses the case of documentary filmmaker Zsóka Nestler (1944–2016) as a springboard for studying women filmmakers in the context of the long 1970s welfare state. Despite being involved in 24 documentary films and TV productions, Nestler is largely unknown to the public and film scholars alike. Although her name was included in film credits, it has often been lost in cataloguing. Her name has been largely absent in the public sphere and is completely missing from film history and documentary film studies. However, Nestler is not just another woman filmmaker whose participation is uncredited and forgotten by film history. She is not a “one-hit-wonder,” but someone active in documentary filmmaking for over five decades, both as a co-director and a sound engineer. Her position as wife and collaborator of Peter Nestler made Zsóka Nestler both absent and present, both visible and invisible (Stigsdotter 2019; Hanssen 2019). The case of Zsóka Nestler offers an interesting paradox: her films are circulating internationally, but her name is absent from film historiography and scholarly research. The Nestler films have been archived, preserved, and digitally restored for international distribution. They are screened in retrospectives and draw interest from new generations of international curators and film festival audiences (Babos and Petri-Lukács 2023; Lang and Holzapfel 2024). Nevertheless, in the DVD box set dedicated to the films of Peter Nestler, Zsóka Nestler’s name is nearly erased from the booklet (Nestler 2012). Her films are out there, her name is not. Such imbalance, I argue, is connected to the dominant notions of authorship and labor, national frameworks, and bias inherent in data and archival infrastructure. What are the limitations of established film scholarly concepts, and what future directions within film and media studies would a case like hers open?

How can queer knowledge in and about audiovisual heritage be preserved and communicated in the archive? Home movies, for example, can be traces of queer lives,desire and emotions. However, this knowledge, which is rarely explicitly visible or audible inthe film material, is usually only produced in a small circle while watching together - if at all.How can these affected traces be collected, preserved and made legible? Under what conditions can they be inscribed into cultural memory? And how do archives navigate the‘ambivalence of visibility’ around vulnerable lives, especially in times of rising threats againstLGBTQ+ communities? Using international examples, such as bildwechsel (Hamburg), the Lesbian Home Movie Project (LHMP) and the Swedish Archive for Queer Moving Images (SAQMI), the talk develops an ethics of archival care work.

Archives are not neutral repositories but epistemic infrastructures through which history, memory, and belonging are produced. Yet queer lives remain unevenly recognised within film and video collections. This article focuses on the ethical and political implications of digitising and circulating queer audiovisual heritage, particularly under European copyright regimes and in the context of artificial intelligence and generative AI trained on cultural heritage materials. Digitisation and online visibility can be both enabling and harmful. The article demonstrates how archival decisions around access, metadata, and description shape recognition, legibility, and vulnerability. Practices such as tagging, the use of metadata, and retrodigitalisation raise questions about consent, retrospective exposure, and the temporal disjunctions produced when past materials circulate in contemporary digital contexts. We therefore need to understand archival workflows as sites where care, power, and responsibility are negotiated.

The article argues for an ethics of care for queer audiovisual heritage on digital platforms. Such an approach shifts attention away from archival objects towards relational processes, emphasising accountability to donors, communities, and future users. The article identifies micro archives as key sites of care-based knowledge. Occasionally community-driven and always specialised, these archives have developed practices attuned to trust, situated ethics, and the management of vulnerability. At the same time, the growing collaboration between micro-archives and national heritage institutions introduces new tensions around the translation of care into larger institutional frameworks. For its examples, the article draws on long-term collaborations with the Swedish National Film Archives, the Swedish Archive for Queer Moving Images, bildwechsel in Hamburg, and the Lesbian Home Movie Project in Maine. It is structured in three parts: an analysis of queer heritage recognition in Swedish national film archives, case studies of care practices in micro archives, and a discussion of what is gained and lost when care-driven archival practices move across institutional scales.

Archive sind keine neutralen Orte, an denen Materialien einfach aufbewahrt werden, sondern epistemische Infrastrukturen: Sie prägen aktiv, wie Geschichte erzählt wird, wie kulturelles Gedächtnis entsteht und wer daran teilhaben kann. Die Anerkennung queerer Lebensentwürfe und Erfahrungen kommt allerdings bei den meisten Archiven zu kurz. Dieser Artikel untersucht die Archivierung und Zugangsgestaltung von Film und Video in Hinblick auf queeres kulturelles Gedächtnis. Im Mittelpunkt stehen die ethischen und politischen Fragen, die sich aus der Digitalisierung und Verbreitung audiovisuellen Kulturerbes ergeben, insbesondere vor dem Hintergrund europäischer Urheberrechtsregelungen sowie des Einsatzes von künstlicher Intelligenz und generativer KI, die auch mit digitalisiertem Kulturerbe trainiert wird. Zwar führt die Anerkennung queerer Geschichte in Archiven und Museen häufig zu einer politisch gewünschten Sichtbarkeit. Diese Sichtbarkeit birgt jedoch wegen der Vulnerabilität queerer Personen Ambivalenzen (Schaffer). Deshalb ist es notwendig, Archiventscheidungen kritisch zu reflektieren, so etwa im Hinblick auf Zugangsregelungen, Metadaten und Beschreibungen. Auch Retrodigitalisierung sowie der Einsatz von Metadaten und Tags bei der Veröffentlichung historischer und zeitgeschichtlicher Materialien auf digitalen Plattformen werfen Fragen nach der ethischen Verantwortung von Archivar_innen auf.

Der Artikel plädiert für eine Ethik der Fürsorge bei der Gestaltung des digtialen Zugangs zu queerem audiovisuellen Erbe. Ein solcher Ansatz verschiebt den Fokus weg von einzelnen Archivobjekten hin zu Beziehungen und Prozessen und betont die Verantwortung von Archivar_innen gegenüber Communities und zukünftigen Nutzer_innen. Besonders in sogenannten Mikroarchiven hat sich wichtiges Wissen über eine solche Care-Ethik entwickelt. Diese Archive arbeiten mit Praktiken, die auf Vertrauen, Fürsorge und einem Bewusstsein für Vulnerabilität beruhen. Gleichzeitig besteht die Gefahr, dass dieses Wissen verloren geht, wenn Mikroarchive zunehmend mit großen nationalen Kultureinrichtungen zusammenarbeiten. Der Artikel stützt sich auf Forschung aus langjährigen Kooperationen mit dem Schwedischen Nationalen Filmarchiv (SFI), dem Swedish Archive for Queer Moving Images (SAQMI), bildwechsel in Hamburg sowie dem Lesbian Home Movie Project in Maine (USA). Er gliedert sich in drei Teile: Zunächst wird die Anerkennung queeren Filmerbes in Schweden analysiert, anschließend folgen Fallstudien zu Care-Praktiken in Mikroarchiven, bevor abschließend die Chancen und Risiken institutioneller Zusammenarbeit diskutiert werden

Contribution to a panel on global queer archiving

Artikeln undersöker vilka former av "care-in-practice" vi kan hitta i mindre arkivprojekt som det feministiska konstnärsprojektet bildwechsel i Hamburg. Detta 'care'-arbete riskerar att gå förlorat när samlingar överförs från mindre arkiv till stora kulturarvsinstitutioner.