Last week we took readers on a visit into the archives of the Rencontres d’Arles. Accessible to all, the Arles Multimedia Library, or Médiathèque, features an unexpected audiovisual patrimony for researchers and photography lovers. From the homepage, visitors can access content that reflects current events at the festival. Aurélien Valette, head of communication for new media at the Rencontres d’Arles, spoke to us about the site’s different uses and future.
Where did the idea for a Rencontres d’Arles multimedia library come from?
It was a simple observation. For the past five years, we’ve seen that the city of Arles is a meeting place between artists and the public, which worked very well in person, but that’s where it ended. Then we realized that we had to show what we were capable of doing every year, giving artists the opportunity to talk about their work and interact with other people, which was very rewarding. All of that led us to the question of patrimony. The festival is 45 years old. It has reflected the course of contemporary photography since its founding. Until now, the festival was always tied to an event and the present moment, but there was little idea of conservation. Some of the directors had made initiatives but they were fragmented.
Recently, in the attic of our offices in Arles, we found boxes of recordings made by the founders in the 1970s. Then it fell apart in the ‘80s and ‘90s before coming back in the 2000s. From there, we started working on a space that would become a holding place for these various documents, which brought us into a partnership with the television station Arte, who helped us record these speeches and moments from the festival. And all of that started coming together five years ago.
What can we find in the multimedia library today?
It should be seen as an online reference library related to the experience of the festival but not entirely. We also hope to give people content , create collections about photographers or subjects addressed during the festival. There are interviews, transcriptions of conferences and debates, over 50 hours of videos, documentaries, recordings from the Théatre Antique, hundreds of hours of sound, mostly from conferences. We also produced a few recordings of visits to exhibitions with the artists themselves. Until now, we’ve preferred to produce our own content, a few co-productions with the Canopée network, and we’ve been recovering audiovisual documents from the INA. In the near future, we would like to open up to contributions from the outside, with schools and magazines. It’s an entirely different economy to be a television station online, and although we’re aware of the rich patrimony that it represents, we still don’t have the means to produce audiovisual content linked to photography. So whoever wants to be a part of it is welcome.
Read the full article in the French version of L’Oeil.
