Exploring cultural production from 'the other side and below', is to seek out the memories, practices, and communities that have been intentionally pushed into the margins. Investigating the Women Filmmakers of the LFMC and the collections at LUX exposed how institutions actively decide which artistic narratives survive and which are allowed to fade, which voices are canonized while others dissolve. However, a truly critical engagement with histories from below required me to pivot away from official, climate-controlled institutional spaces and look directly at my own family's history.

Digging into my mother's archive of MiniDV tapes from 2000s Ireland, I found myself confronting a physical record of radical women standing against multi-national corporate expansion. As our lectures explored, late-stage capitalism and climate colonialism expand by erasing the environments they exploit and silencing the communities that resist. Preservation is an act of defiance against a system that profits from our forgetfulness.

For my family, like many, this amnesia is not an abstract concept but a lived trauma. Structural misogyny has historically buried the contributions, voices, and sanity of radical women, leaving behind wounds we still carry. My mother's MiniDV tapes are a physical rebuttal to this violence. Many of the brave women she filmed have passed away, but their presence remains inscribed in the magnetic code.

Digitizing and showcasing these tapes alongside the avant-garde history of the LFMC rescues their memory from the margins. This project proves that time-based media is a matrilineal lifeline. The glitches, the digital tracking noise, and the physical degradation of the magnetic tape are material proofs of survival. By looking back at the footage of these women, and seeing my own child-self embedded within their lines of protest, I am actively recovering my own gaze. Preserving my mother's archive is how we refuse to be forgotten, transforming an assignment into a personal blueprint for structural healing. The work remains, resolutely, to be continued...

 

 

Time itself has disintegrated, eroding the tape.

Time has disintegrated and eroded so much more than plastic and silver halide.

This footage was captured twenty years into the shadow of Thatcherism, the dawn of a neoliberal orthodoxy that codified the privatization of our shared natural resources. Two decades have passed since these frames were exposed, forcing us to confront the ultimate question: have her ideological aims finally been met? Was an entire economic system merely the weapon of choice, wielded with the explicit purpose of altering the human soul?

Against the metaphysics of late-stage capitalism and the systematic affective erasure dictated by the institutional canon, this celluloid acts as a barrier.

The film is a witness.

The film is living.

The film is alchemical.