The Disobedience Archive is a constantly growing video archive with no fixed location initiated by Marco Scotini in 2005. Comprising more than one hundred documentary and art films at the intersection of art and activism, all show forms of resistance, social struggle and collective self-organisation. Events, voices and gestures realign in new formations, opening up a wide range of viewpoints and interpretations, rather than insisting on one truth only.
Titled Disobedience Archive (Canopy for Broken Time), this is the most comprehensive presentation to date on view, with fifty film documents in all. The selection of works is a response to the fragility of our time: ecological crises, political polarisation, technological acceleration and ongoing global conflicts.
Raqs Media Collective was invited to engage with the premise of the Disobedience Archive. The Collective, for whom time is a central axis in their practice, asks in turn: How can time be experienced beyond the rigid structures of our present moment?
The exhibition encounters our fractured present with open spatial structures. The starting point for this is the shamiana, a temporary canopy that is easy to erect, and that plays an important role in the everyday life of South Asia. Food is eaten, celebrations are held and mourning takes place under a shamiana – and protesters gather here, too. The simple canopy turns into a symbol of togetherness. For, in the words of Raqs Media Collective, to be together under the shamiana means to share time, to become community, to measure the world not in hours, but in gestures of attentiveness towards others.
