The International Archive

The International Archive is a whimsical, ongoing visual anthropology project that collects perspectives on the world (places, memories, and above all, collective imaginaries) through two intertwined practices: documentary filmmaking and film workshops, held especially with children.

At its core is an academic idea: the film workshop as an ethnographic device. The project treats the act of making a film together, deciding what world to invent, as a way of surfacing how a community imagines itself and the world around it. People become co-researchers: their stories, drawings, and choices in front of and behind the camera reveal imaginaries outside academia.

The project was born out of fieldwork in Brazil, developed as part of a Master’s thesis in Anthropology at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, conducted with the Tupinambá community of Acuípe de Baixo. What began as academic research into local cosmologies and everyday life grew into a method: setting up small, playful film labs as a way of listening, building an archive about the images, stories, and imaginative worlds a place’s people carry.

Since then, The International Archive has aimed to travel bringing the same approach to other communities and contexts, each workshop adding new fragments to a growing, deliberately incomplete collection of ways of seeing the world. The result is part documentary practice, part participatory research, part invitation to imagine collectively an archive built to keep multiplying it and extend it.