This programme is based on an initial mapping of video art on a European scale undertaken between 2016 and 2020 thanks to the organisation of research seminars at the Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF), the Institut d’histoire de l’art in Paris (INHA) and ECAL in partnership with the Université Paris 8. This first research programme was jointly funded by the Arts H2-H laboratory of excellence and then ESTHC, with ECAL and the BnF as partners. This indexing should be continued in many other regions with the aim of transnational rewriting.
The objective of the research project is twofold. On the one hand, it aims to re-evaluate continental production, to take the measure of its richness and variety, and to identify a European identity – mixed, plural, open, but nevertheless forming a cultural whole – in the practice of video art. On the other hand, the aim is to rewrite the history of this medium on an international scale, counterbalancing the America-centric character of the specialised literature on the subject in order to draw other topographies, which also include Japan or South America, with Europe constituting a node within a wider network.
In order to carry out this project to renew the approach to video art, both historiographically and theoretically, we are relying on the network of some fifty national and international specialists, researchers, archive holders, artists, and witnesses that the previous programme enabled us to establish. By questioning the medium of video, the aim is also to contribute to the creation of an archaeology of new media in Europe through a series of publications and an exhibition.
videoarteurope.com
