Unarchiving. CIFRA Meetup

An archive is never neutral. It decides what enters history and what disappears — whose stories are kept, whose are lost. In this conversation, three artists whose practices engage the archive as both material and method joined CIFRA for an hour of candid dialogue about found footage, decay, and what survives by accident.

Bill Morrison (USA) — Academy Award-nominated filmmaker and poet laureate of lost films — spoke about his visits to nitrate vaults, the films that wash up on his shores, and why he's started working with police body cam footage with the same eye he brings to century-old celluloid.

Masha Godovannaya (Russia / Mexico) — experimental filmmaker and researcher working with DIY cinema, post-Soviet archives, and decolonial methodologies — on ghosts as concrete historical figures, inhabiting Eisenstein's editing logic, and what a film scanner makes possible that nothing else can.

Rafał Morusiewicz (Austria) — artist, curator, and researcher working with found material across film, print, and textile — on mixtape editing, shadow libraries, and why he never decides in advance what he wants from an archive.

Together they moved through questions of haunting, trust, intuition, and what it means to let the material lead.