FIAT/IFTA World Conference 2019

In Argentina, video art was born out of television. Unlike traditional stories from Europe and the US, Argentinean video artists producing within the country during the 80s did not emerge directly from the visual arts, the performance or the music field. Rather, many of them worked under a strong influence from the TV –either because they were TV professionals or because they would manifest a persistent critique of that media in their works.
Unfortunately, this unique history is hard to trace. In Argentina, most TV archives have become inaccessible –due to legal issues, disposal of tapes, lack of proper preservation actions, etc., which is why digitization is far from being a solution. However, many video art pieces have (unintentionally) become a way of documenting our TV history and many key historical moments of our past. By focusing on the analysis of a mix of national independent, institutional, small-scale, individual and collective efforts, this paper will argue that video preservation has become an indirect strategy to prevent the extinction of a part of our TV history, a fundamental dimension of our collective memory.