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April 12 to April 24 2010@ Home WorksAshkal AlwanBeirutTo not wait for the archive is often a practical response to the fact that there are missing or absent archives in many parts of the world. And to wait for the state archive, or to wait to be archived, is not a healthy option. Archiving practices--  finding and caring for things, drawing on existing collections, publishing from archives-- are then political practices, which in different ways overwrite their own futures. By now, digital technologies and its networks are fully enmeshed in these questions of the archive and the future: with "archivisation" and auto-archiving on the one hand, and the continuing anxieties and possibilities around reproduction and distribution, on the other.So is there something, in the density of our contemporary experiences in Bombay, Bangalore, Beirut or on the internet, that can lead us to a shared theory of the archive that goes beyond its dominant canons (Benjamin, Foucault, Derrida)?The realist metaphysics of "don't wait" lets us see the archive as neither a fixed concept nor as unbounded potential, but as a concrete set of negotiations, costs, transactions, tools and imaginations that hold an archive together, and that may be further "traded". To begin this kind of trafficking: in open software, in films and footage, in interests and curiosities, in histories and objects, in articulations of the regional and universal future of images-- is the reason we come to Beirut and to Home Works.The project is proposed as a two-week workshop period, more a time for production than an extended "event".  The workshop will involve working with materials from Beirut (the Cinemayat video collection from 2006 is one starting point) which will be digitised and annotated through http://pad.ma. Further, filmmakers, writers and researchers are invited to contribute materials, and to explore ways of writing across and through video material. During Home Works, the http://pad.ma group and the Beirut participants will take part in a 5-hour colloquium, which will present and discuss our findings.24 April, Saturday http://pad.ma Colloquim at Home Works V, 4:30 pm - 9:30 pm.Link