Media Mutations 16

Bologna, Dipartimento delle Arti – Palazzo Marescotti, May 26th-27th, 2025
Organized by Luca Barra, Matteo Marinello, Emiliano Rossi (Università di Bologna), Susanne Eichner (Filmuniversität Babelsberg Konrad Wolf, Potsdam) and Anne-Katrin Weber (Université de Lausanne)

The opportunity to store and preserve full records or fragments of already aired programmes has been a crucial challenge for the entire television industry since its inception, implying issues of material feasibility, editorial advantage and, not least, economic viability. Despite substantial geographical discrepancies and various capacities, PSBs and legacy networks have mostly initiated in-house archives and digitised repositories. On the other hand, local channels and less institutionalised TV companies have been inconsistent, with the result that significant portions of their cultural heritage have been lost, or are barely available. Concurrently, from the second half of the 1990s, the interdependence between media and audiovisual archives has undergone a radical evolution: digitisation, recovery, preservation, access, and sharing have gradually become buzzwords of any creative chain, while video collections have been widely reinstated as tools for storytelling, memory/identity-building, and corporate branding.

The 16th edition of Media Mutations international conference – developed within the scope of the PRIN 2020 research project ATLas – Atlante delle Televisioni Locali (Atlas of Local Televisions) – will explore and engage with the history and recent developments of TV archives, investigated both on a theoretical, technical and operational basis and with attention to their commercial potential. In an age of multi-channel and digital platforms, the use of archives as sources entails constant renegotiations of the ties between technology and memory, opening unexpected glimpses in public history and delving into the political dimension of cultural heritage’s reuse, exploitation and enhancement. Accordingly, the conference aims to foster dialogue on current practices, policies and emerging trends as far as the establishment, curation and maintenance of media corporations’ archives are concerned, while raising complex questions around their fair use(s).

FINAL CONFERENCE PROGRAMME

MONDAY, MAY 26TH
9.30 — Institutional Greetings
Riccardo Brizzi (Director, Dipartimento delle Arti, Università di Bologna)
Mirko Degli Esposti (President, Associazione Media Mutations)
Giacomo Manzoli (President, Consulta Universitaria del Cinema)
Marco De Nicolò (President, Società Italiana per lo Studio della Storia Contemporanea)
Luca Barra (Principal investigator, ATLas – Atlante delle Televisioni Locali, PRIN 2020)

10.00 — Panel 1. Archival Uses and Re-uses
Chair: Veronica Innocenti (Università di Bologna)
• Towards Critical Re-Use Literacy in Television Archives
Berber Hagedoorn (University of Groningen)
• Folk-archiving Minor Audiovisual Contents. Television Programs, Pirate Care and Shadow Libraries
Jacopo Rasmi (Université Jean Monnet, Saint Etienne)
• Archiving Television and Celebrating Legacy. Mike Bongiorno’s Centenary Exhibition and TV Miniseries
Daniela Cardini (IULM, Milano)
• Is this Radio – Or Television? Audiovisual Representations of Radio Broadcasts in Japan’s NHK Archives
Nanako Ota (International Research Center for Japanese Studies, Kyoto)

11.45 — Keynote Speech
Valuing and Preserving Local Television in the United States
Ethan Thompson (Texas A&M University - Corpus Christi)
Discussant: Anne-Katrin Weber (Université de Lausanne)

14.30 — Celebration. Ten Years of SERIES
Veronica Innocenti (Università di Bologna)
Héctor J. Pérez (Universitat Politècnica de València)
Guglielmo Pescatore (Università di Bologna)

15.00 — Panel 2. Some Results from the ATLas Research Project
Chair: Luca Barra (Università di Bologna)
• “Hello, Is the Mayor Here?” Local Politics in Turin Private Broadcasting. The Case of Videogruppo Piemonte
Riccardo Fassone, Paola Zeni (Università di Torino)
• Chronicle of a Momentaneous Success. Entertainment and Consumer Goods in Antenna 3’s Early Stage (1977-82)
Emiliano Rossi (Università di Bologna)
• Pannella & Pallone. TeleRoma56’s Glocal Broadcasting between Politics and Entertainment
Giulia Crisanti, Damiano Garofalo (Sapienza Università di Roma)
• Bringing the Nation to the “Provincia”. Promotional strategies and Entertainment on TeleSanterno (1976-82)
Matteo Marinello (Università di Bologna)
• Mapping the Legacy of Audiovisual Archives. The Sardinian Case
Diego Cavallotti, Myriam Mereu (Università di Cagliari)

17.00 — Panel 3. Dialogues with Archives and Industries
Chair: Paolo Noto (Università di Bologna)
• Reconfiguring Television Archives. Alternative Pasts and Plausible Futures
Dana Mustata (University of Groningen, FIAT/IFTA)
• Organising Collaboration of Archives and Academics in Media Studies
Bas Agterberg (Sound & Vision)
• Redundances and Stereotypes. Does Archival Reuse Reinforce the Lack of Diversity?
Matteo Treleani (Université Côte d’Azur)
• Neck-Deep in Digital Oil? Public Broadcasters’ Archives as AI Training Datasets
Brecht Declerq (RSI Radiotelevisione Svizzera, FIAT/IFTA)


TUESDAY, MAY 27TH
9.30 — Panel 4. Operating on Archives
Chair: Elisa Farinacci (Università di Bologna)
• Reframing Public Broadcasting Archives in Europe. Developing New Strategies for Improved Contextualisation
Carolyn Birdsall (University of Amsterdam)
• Creating New Metadata Layers for National Memory Institutions. A Comparative Study of Estonian Public Broadcasting and Baltic Film, Media and Arts School Archives
Andres Kõnno (University of Tallinn)
• AI Blob! LLM-Driven Recontextualization of Italian Television Archives
Roberto Balestri (Università di Bologna)
• Reconstructing Histories. Mapping Artists’ Film and Video on Channel 4 through Archival Ruination (1982-92)
Nicole Atkinson (Birkbeck University of London, LUX)
• “Welcome to Granadaland!” The Television Studio as Heterotopic Space
Victoria Lowe (University of Manchester)

11.15 — Launch of the ATLas Database and Digital Exhibitions
Luca Barra (Università di Bologna)
Martina Caroli (AlmaDL, Università di Bologna)

11.45 — Keynote Speech
What to Do about Taste-less Transmissions? Useful Television Histories
Kit Hughes (College of Liberal Arts, Colorado State University)
Discussant: Susanne Eichner (Filmuniversität Babelsberg Konrad Wolf, Potsdam)

14.30 — Panel 5. Re-mediating the Archive
Chair: Marco Cucco (Università di Bologna)
• True Crime and Television Archives. Mediation, Re-Enactment, and Self-Reflexivity in Post-2010 Series
Alessia Casiraghi, Diletta Cenni (IULM, Milano)
• From Memory to Streaming. The Role of Historical Archives in Strengthening Public Television’s OTT in Spain
Tamara Antona-Jimeno, José Ignacio Nevado Hernández (Universidad Complutense, Madrid)
• An Archives Utopia. Attempts and Illusions of the Studio Portals Catalogues
Nicolò Villani (CUBE, Centro Universitario Bolognese di Etnosemiotica)
• The Evolution of the Audiovisual Archives of Estonian Public Broadcasting and Their Impact on the Reproduction of Cultural Memory
Hanna Šein-Meier (University of Tallinn)
• Democratizing Higher Education Through Television in the Open University’s A305 Course on History of Architecture and Design (1890–1939)
Grazia Quercia, Marco Manfra (UniMarconi, Università di Camerino)

16.30 — Panel 6. National, Regional and Lateral Histories
Chair: Paola Brembilla (Università di Bologna)
• Capturing a Region’s History. The NBN Television Archive’s Cultural Legacy
Ann Hardy (University of Newcastle)
• The Original Exception of TeleCapodistria, an Italian TV Station in Yesterday’s Yugoslavia and Today’s Slovenia
Vito Saracino (Università di Foggia, Fondazione Gramsci di Puglia)
• Telling the Territory through the Archive. For a Recovery of the Documentary Production of Rai Puglia.
Michelangelo Cardinaletti (Università del Salento)
• Decolonising the Archive. Rethinking Audiovisual Heritage in the ERT Collection
Gregory Pritsas (Aristotle University, Thessaloniki)

18.00 — Closing Remarks