Drawing on an interdisciplinary approach, this article aims to outline some theoretical issues concerning the archival structure of videos developed during the Eighties and the Nineties in Bologna’s alternative scene. More specifically, we will focus on two archives, Cassero CDOC Centre’s video archive and Home Movies — the Italian National Amateur Film Archive, which host two different video repositories that stemmed from a common background: Bologna’s countercultural environment, in which we can find the “1990 Student Movement” (the so-called Pantera) and the gay and lesbian scene that belonged to Arcigay and Il Cassero. These materials shared not only some production/fruition modalities, but, very often, the same people took part in them: we can see members of the gay community who were, in the meantime, students who participated in the university occupations. Therefore, the main questions we have to answer are: which kind of archival framework is the most appropriate for such materials? Are the current archival practices correct in order to abide by the original context and motivations that fostered their production? Our reply refers to the notion of transarchive.
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Queering the Amateur Analog Video Archive: The Case of Bologna’s Countercultural Life in the 80s and the 90s
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Queering the Amateur Analog Video Archive: The Case of Bologna’s Countercultural Life in the 80s and the 90s
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Queering the Amateur Analog Video Archive:
The Case of Bologna’s Countercultural Life in the 80s and the 90s1
Diego Cavallotti, University of Udine
Elisa Virgili, University of Insubria (Varese-Como)




Abstract

     Drawing on an interdisciplinary approach, this article aims to outline some the-
     oretical issues concerning the archival structure of videos developed during the
     Eighties and the Nineties in Bologna’s alternative scene. More specifically, we will
     focus on two archives, Cassero CDOC Centre’s video archive and Home Movies
     — the Italian National Amateur Film Archive, which host two different video re-
     positories that stemmed from a common background: Bologna’s countercultural
     environment, in which we can find the “1990 Student Movement” (the so-called
     Pantera) and the gay and lesbian scene that belonged to Arcigay and Il Cassero.
     These materials shared not only some production/fruition modalities, but, very
     often, the same people took part in them: we can see members of the gay com-
     munity who were, in the meantime, students who participated in the university
     occupations. Therefore, the main questions we have to answer are: which kind of
     archival framework is the most appropriate for such materials? Are the current
     archival practices correct in order to abide by the original context and motivations
     that fostered their production? Our reply refers to the notion of transarchive.


Introduction

    When we talk about the interrelationships between LGBT2 themes, archival

1
  The essay was conceived and developed by the authors in close collaboration. However, as regards
the draft of single sections, Diego Cavallotti wrote the paragraphs PVEH Collection, Transarchive:
A Queered Model for the Amateur Video LGBT Archive, and Step 2: Queer Transarchiviality; Elisa
Virgili wrote the paragraphs Il Cassero’s Amateur Video Collection, Queering archival records, and
Step 1: Private/Public Dialectic.
2
  This term causes certain difficulties — first of all, issues of definition. For instance, in this
article we use the term LGBT because we refer to the current name of the archive we accessed (Il
Cassero LGBT Center’s CDOC); however, from 1982 to 1994 nobody employed this acronym. The
movement started to use the formula National Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transsexual Coordination
Pride Rainbow for the National Pride in Venice, 1997, and the acronym LGBT since the Rome
World Pride in 2000. This is not a mere linguistic clarification: the different terms indicate not
only different historical transformations, but also different types of mobilization structures the

                                        Cinéma & Cie, vol. XVI, no. 26-27, Spring/Summer 2016
                                  Diego Cavallotti, Elisa Virgili


frameworks, and amateur analog video collections, we are confronted with an
epistemological conundrum. LGBT amateur videos, both in home3 and commu-
nity4 modes of communication, were concrete emanations of a countercultural
environment that tended to blend their modal boundaries: first, this was not only
because they were produced within the LGBT community, but in fact specifical-
ly addressed to its members, therefore creating a semi-public fruition context
in which the presence of a non-LGBT audience was limited; second, because
we can compare the community itself (as a social place where both political and
affective bonds are established) to the ‘family-we-choose’, originally described
by Weston.5
   Suppose these materials become part of an archive: how can we account for
the inner fluidity of the social and cultural bonds that stood behind the produc-
tion of these audiovisual products? To what extent should this fluidity be an
inner feature of this archive?
   Starting from these questions, throughout this paper we will focus on two
different collections. The first one is preserved in Bologna at Il Cassero LGBT
Center’s CDOC ‘Flavia Madaschi’6 and refers to VHS format videos related to a
ten-years time span (1982-1991). It is composed by amateur videos produced
within the LGBT community of Bologna (mainly by K.G.B.&B. [Kassero Gay
Band & Ballet]). The second one is stored in Bologna at Home Movies – Italian
Amateur Film Archive: it is composed by U-Matic, VHS, S-VHS, VHS-C, S-
VHS-C, Video8, Hi8 videos and regards the activities of Bologna’s countercultu-
ral network — more specifically the activities of the so-called Pantera movement,
created by protesting students who participated in the house-squatting scene as
well. The group included gay and lesbian students who were members of Il Cas-
sero: during the 1990 student movement they developed their own group, called
Pantera Rosa, which was one of the first efforts to create a university gay-lesbian
group since the 1977 movement.
   These students appeared in and helped to shoot videos belonging to both
collections. So, what should we do with them? Should we keep them apart or
should we try to develop an archival framework in which their interrelationships
are made visible?



movement dealt with. Politiche dell’orgoglio. Sessualità, soggettività e movimenti sociali, ed. by
Massimo Prearo (Pisa: ETS, 2015).
3
  Richard Chalfen, Snapshot Versions of Life (Bowling Green: Bowling Green State University
Popular Press, 1987), pp. 4–16, 49-69.
4
  Ryan Shand, ‘Theorizing Amateur Cinema: Limitations and Possibilities’, The Moving Image, 8.2
(2008), 36–60 (p. 53).
5
  Kath Weston, Families We Choose: Lesbians, Gays, Kinship (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1991).
6
  This documentation centre (CDOC) was founded in 1983 and its development paralleled the
growth of Bologna’s movement (Circolo di Cultura Omosessuale 28 Giugno and, since 1985,
Circolo Arcigay Il Cassero). ‘Il Cassero. Chi siamo’, <http://www.cassero.it/chi-siamo/il-cassero/>
[accessed 18 May 2016].

92
                          Queering the Amateur Analog Video Archive


Theoretical and Methodological Framework

   First of all, we don’t aim to develop here a fully-fledged paradigm accounting
for the multi-layered interconnections that complex archival items7 refer to, com-
pelling the archivists to deconstruct institutional boundaries such as the archival
ones. Moreover, we don’t aim to reconstruct the whole social networks in which
these materials were produced, although we think that these videos hint at them
and they should be part of our research targets. Finally, we don’t aim to ‘queer’
the collections mentioned above as a display of theoretical mastery that is an end
unto itself: our goal is to elicit specific issues concerning the archival life of these
videos, which relate to them as emanations of counter-cultural communities that
often cross their paths, such as Il Cassero’s and Pantera’s ones.
   When it comes to describe their archival features, first of all we should ask
ourselves how they relate to the complexity of their original production/fruition
contexts. One of the hypotheses we are focusing on is that Il Cassero’s and Pan-
tera’s archival repositories should engage in dialogue with each other, overtaking
their institutional boundaries. This means, on the one hand, that the creation
of a counter-cultural video archive should take into account the heterogeneous
composition of the community in which these videos were originally produced
and screened; on the other hand, to pinpoint how audiovisual communication
was one of the tools that helped the lesbians, gays, bisexuals and transgenders to
interact with other communities, becoming part of a broader social and cultural
scene as well. Through this perspective, queering LGBT archival items (or collec-
tions) means to disclose its inter-linkages with items (or collections) preserved in
other archives whose major goal is to save the collective memory of other social
groups, adding new possible identity layers to the LGBT galaxy.8
   In other words — and here comes the answer to the second point, which re-
gards our theoretical frame — to queer an archive means for us to develop Mor-
ris’s and Rawson’s assumptions: in ‘Queer Archives/Archival Queers’ they affirm
that this act critiques and challenges ‘the normativizing collecting and circulating
practices of other institutions’9 — in our case those audiovisual archives (LGBT,
amateur film archives, etc.), whose primary goal is to preserve the memory of a
community without taking into account the ramifications of itineraries in which
more than just one countercultural community is involved. These trajectories
enrich and, at the same time, question established identities, showing how com-


7
  In other words, we are talking about items that lack a solid documentary apparatus because they
were produced in an informal context. In order to reconstruct their history, we have to rely on oral
documents, memoirs, or even anecdotes. Sean Cubitt, ‘Anecdotal Evidence’, Necsus, 2.1 (Spring
2013), 5–18 (pp. 5–8).
8
   Scott Bravmann, Queer Fictions of the Past: History, Culture, and Difference (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. X.
9
  Charles Morris and K.J. Rawson, ‘Queer Archives/Archival Queers’, in Theorizing Histories of
Rhetoric, ed. by Michelle Ballif, (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2013), 74–89 (p.
76).

                                                                                                 93
                                   Diego Cavallotti, Elisa Virgili


munity membership is not a matter of exclusivity: some of Il Cassero’s members
were also Pantera’s students, for instance.
   Starting from these stances, we feel the need to account for a multi-layered
framework10 in which the archives develop ambiguous relations with the items
they store because they thematize the fact that they refer to different communities,
in our case the LGBT and the student movement ones. Thus, what is at stake
here is a sort of amphibolous and paradoxical teleology, in which we cannot
recognize the emergence of a univocal identity, but an iterative act of creating
multiple identities. More specifically, in our cases, conceiving these audiovisual
archives as open and fluid infrastructures means to open new breaches both
in the LGBT and in the ‘1990 Student Movement’ identities, renewing their
inner features in a more inclusive fashion. Thus, the act of queering archival
LGBT collections hints at complex and polymorphous historical constructions,
in which we can find ‘queer traces’ (oppositionality, fluidity, polymorphy, etc.).
   In order to investigate the hybridity and the inherently openness of these
constructions, we will refer to an interdisciplinary approach, which will cross
the research pathways of queer theory (Morris and Rawson’s framework),
amateur film and video theory (Zimmermann’s approach11) and archive theory
(Ketelaar’s and Cook and Schwartz’s epistemic sets12). Drawing on these
references, we will not linger on in-depth descriptions of Il Cassero’s and Pantera’s
collections: instead, we will reflect on how the institutional boundaries between
these collections can be re-programmed in order to account for the inherent
oppositionality, fluidity and polymorphy of their items and the complexity of
the social networks they stem from. For this purpose, we will develop the notion
of transarchive.


Il Cassero’s Amateur Video Collection

   The birth of Italian gay movement is conventionally connected to the founda-
tion of Fuori! in 1972. Fuori! was the first organisation that catalysed the stances
of the Italian gay world and sought to develop a common political agenda. Very
soon, however, a diaspora started to undermine Fuori!’s project:13 in 1974, after
Fuori! moved closer to the Italian Radical Party (a left-liberalist party), many
of its members splintered and joined new groups — often local, underground


10
   Jake Halberstam, In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies, Subcultural Lives (New York:
New York University Press, 2005), p. 170.
11
   Patricia R. Zimmermann, ‘The Home Movie Movement: Excavations, Artifacts, Minings’, in
Mining the Home Movie: Excavations in Histories and Memories, ed. by Karen L. Ishizuka and
Patricia R. Zimmermann (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 2008),
1–28 (p. 18).
12
   Eric Ketelaar, ‘Tacit Narratives: The Meanings of Archives’, Archival Science, 1.2 (2001), 131–141
(pp. 137–41).
13
   Which was the establishment of a stable political platform for the Italian gay rights movement.

94
                        Queering the Amateur Analog Video Archive


groups. One of them was the Collettivo Frocialista, founded in Bologna in 1977,
which, one year later, became Circolo di Cultura Omosessuale 28 Giugno.14
   This was the first gay culture club to engage in dialogue with a state institution:
Bologna’s municipality (led by the Italian Communist Party15), whose mayor,
Renzo Imbeni, signed an agreement in 1982 with the founding members of Circolo
28 Giugno, offering them a venue for cultural activities. In 1985, the Circolo 28
Giugno became the national headquarter of Arcigay, the most important Italian
gay association, under the name of Circolo Arcigay Il Cassero. Throughout the
late Eighties and the beginnings of the Nineties, Il Cassero developed several
campaigns that targeted the outbreak of the AIDS epidemic and discrimination
against gay people.
   First and foremost, however, Il Cassero became one of the cores of Bologna’s
countercultural scene, presenting itself as a hub for its theatrical and cine-video-
graphic collectives. K.G.B.&B. was one of the most influential groups: it was di-
rected by Stefano Casagrande, who, in the late Nineties, became Il Cassero’s chief
coordinator.16 Their productions were often staged at Il Cassero during club par-
ties (for example, at the beginnings of the Nineties, every New Year’s Eve party
would host a K.G.B.&B performance) or specific events, such as the first party/
gay ball held for celebrating the 1982 agreement with Bologna’s municipality.
   The ball was recorded on a videotape called MEGALOMENIA – Festa del
circolo 28 giugno – ITALIAN SLIP 1982 ‘NIKOTINA & GAY CASSERO BAND’
– Sala Sirenella (Quartiere San Donato) (VHS, 1982), which is one the earliest
documents preserved at Il Cassero’s CDOC.
   First of all, it is worth noting the stereotypical mode of amateur communica-
tion: a text with low coherence and cohesion (a fragmentary sum of performa-
tive highlights of the party rather than a cohesive textual structure that tells us
about the ball), audiovisual grammatical mistakes (no transitions from one shot
to another, the use of an annoying spotlight that blinds whoever is portrayed,
a large number of camera-looks, etc.), and a manifest technical poorness. As a
consequence of these practical and semiotic features, we are confronted with se-
veral problems in decoding the video’s meaning-making processes: if we cannot
count on anyone that assists in interpreting them (someone that recognizes the
party’s participants and helps to contextualize the video), we cannot read them
properly. So, as often happens, the images ‘are taken up as intermediary, mne-
monic, and channelling device through which the viewer evokes and identifies


14
   Massimo Prearo, La fabbrica dell’orgoglio. Una genealogia dei movimenti LGBT (Pisa: ETS,
2015), pp. 76–84.
15
   Since 1979, the Italian Communist Party has shown some interest in the gay and lesbian
community: the members of Arci (a leftist Italian Cultural Association close to the Communist
and the Socialist Parties) created a civil rights commission coordinated by Marco Bisceglia, an
openly gay priest. One year later, Bisceglia founded Arcigay, which became, from 1983, when
Fuori! ceased to exist, the biggest Italian gay association.
16
   Stefano Casi, Teatro in delirio. La vera storia del K.G.B.&B. – Kassero Gay Ballet and Band
(Bologna: CDOC, 1989), pp. 53–54.

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                                   Diego Cavallotti, Elisa Virgili


not with the mimetic image, but with an absent person or past event’,17 their
relevance exceeds their content, inviting the viewer to re-join the past events it
represents. These materials are closely tied to their original production/fruition
contexts: to investigate them is to understand how their social fabric is reflected
in their textual features.
   The contents of the video get clearer as the camera-operator focuses on
K.G.B.&B.’s show. It consists in a parody concert and in a comic performance.
In fact culminates in a serious epilogue in which a ball participant in drag reads
Circolo 28 Giugno’s declaration of intent, in which it is stated that every member
should fight against homophobia, sexual discriminations and every kind of
identity constraint. Thus, MEGALOMENIA can be interpreted in two different
ways: on the one hand, as a document witnessing Bologna’s gay lifestyle before
the outbreak of the AIDS epidemic in Italy, as an audiovisual emanation of
Bologna’s gay movement, in which we can observe the joy of the community
united to spend leisure time together and, of course, to celebrate an institutional
achievement; and on the other, as a polyvocal milestone of a broader and inclusive
movement, which cannot be defined only as ‘gay’.
   Since the mid-eighties, K.G.B.&B. started to explore the possibilities of
videomaking. One of the most important efforts was Cassero News (VHS, 1990).
It was an ‘amateur video-newsreel’ shot in Il Cassero’s cellar and narrowcasted on
the bar TVs of the club, providing information (the activities of L.I.L.A. [Italian
League Against AIDS], the most important news about Il Cassero’s community,
gay-themed movies, etc.) and entertainment (Maga Tamara’s column — a man
in drag, ‘Sorceress Tamara’, giving some advice to lonely hearts calling on the
phone) for the gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender communities of Bologna.
In the second (and last) edition of Cassero News we can find an interview of the
members of Pantera Rosa – among them is Vincenzo Tallarico,18 who was, at
the same time, one of Il Cassero’s most active members. One of the main topics
conveyed during the interview was the emergence of a new generation of gay
men whose lives were very different from their ‘older siblings’: they had their
first sexual experiences only after the ravages of AIDS had changed the way in
which sexuality was conceived, and, more generally, they did not conform to
the identities of thirty-fourty year-old gay men or lesbian women; they were first
of all students, who lived their lives at the borders of the community and were
involved in the exciting underground scene of Bologna, which, in those days,
witnessed the appearance of a new protesting student movement, the Pantera
movement.


17
   Vivian Sobchack, ‘Toward a Phenomenology of Nonfictional Film Experience’, in Collecting
Visible Evidence, ed. by Jane M. Gaines and Michael Renov (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1999), pp. 241–54 (p. 247).
18
   Vincenzo Tallarico was, in those days, a University of Bologna’s student and one of the most
important Il Cassero’s activists: despite his young age, he became part of Il Cassero’s board in 1990.
Later on he moved away from Bologna and put aside activism.

96
                       Queering the Amateur Analog Video Archive


PVEH Collection

   In 1990, a law proposal by the socialist Minister of University and Scientific
Research Antonio Ruberti gave rise to a protesting student movement, which
took issue in particular with the corporatization of the university and the admis-
sion of private citizens or institutions onto university boards. Within a month,
the movement (called Pantera), captured the public conscience of the students
and became a national issue. The protesting students proved their communica-
tive skills very quickly:19 they used fax technology to send messages to each other
all over Italy, they developed behaviour protocols for TV or press journalists, and
they shot counter-information videos.20
   In Bologna, a group of film students gave rise to an experimental audiovisual
project called Videogiornale, a video-newsreel that documented the everyday life
of Pantera’s protests. They provided a full-coverage of the university occupa-
tions, creating a small distribution network among the university departments.
Every evening an edition of Videogiornale was screened: this is how, in a sort
of pre-digital way, the students connected to each other, informing the squat-
ters what was happening in their community and how they were perceived by
the outside world — ‘video-journalists’ often interviewed pedestrians about the
university protests.
   Videogiornale’s master cameras and edited newsreels are now part of the
PVEH Collection. They belong to a wider collection that documents Bologna’s
countercultural life in the late Eighties/early Nineties, from Pantera to the house-
squatting scene, from the rise of cyberpunk culture to a peculiar experiment of
a local TV station (called Pratello TV). Videogiornale and the Pantera protest
movement should be recognized as the formative experience of a group of young
students that, throughout the years, grew up, changed its members and took part
in Bologna’s lively countercultural scene.
   Since Videogiornale created a sort of audiovisual network within Pantera’s
community, it became the best way to make announcements. This was the case
for Pantera Rosa. In a VHS named GAY PANTERA ROSA di Luciano Seminario
Autogestito GAY/Lesbo (VHS, 1990) in the PVEH Collection, the representa-
tives of Pantera Rosa informed other students about the gay and lesbian meet-
ings during the university occupation. Their brief video-announcement was then
included in the fifteenth edition of Videogiornale, which was narrowcasted on
the TVs of the university’s (occupied) classrooms. Among Pantera Rosa’s mem-
bers, we can once again identify Vincenzo Tallarico, who, with other male gay
students, discusses the relevance of gays and lesbians in past student movements,
and the importance of a new political subject that includes new sexual identities.


19
   Loredana Colace and Susanna Ripamonti, Il circo e la Pantera. I mass-media sulle orme del
movimento degli studenti (Roma: Led, 1990).
20
   Nando Simeone, Gli studenti della Pantera. Storia di un movimento rimosso, (Roma: Alegre,
2010), pp. 65–80.

                                                                                         97
                             Diego Cavallotti, Elisa Virgili


This new subject should link the needs of the gay/lesbian community to a broad-
er political landscape, in which a new generation of activists could find its place.
   Thus, to sum up, it is necessary to focus on two different amateur videos that
were shot almost during the same period, had the same communicative aims,
referred to the same people and now belong to two different archives. More
specifically, the presence of Tallarico in both videos reveals the tight bonds that
link Bologna’s young activists to a broader countercultural movement: as activ-
ists they took part in a student movement simply because they were both gay
(or lesbians) and students. This compels us to reflect upon a simple but often
neglected notion: when we talk about LGBT audiovisual products we should not
merely identify who shot or appeared in them only in terms of sexual orientation,
but we should account for the complex framework in which they establish social,
cultural, and affective bonds.
   In order to solve these research problems, we will develop the notion of trans-
archive as a queered archival model.


Transarchive: A Queered Model

   If we want to engage in dialogue with these collections and disclose their queer
and transarchival potential, we have to start from two specific issues.
   Firstly, we have the definition of queer archive, as both an enunciational prin-
ciple and an actual counter-institution that challenges the normativization of
archival practices. As we stated in our introduction, Morris and Rawson’s no-
tion of ‘queer’ as the act of queering LGBT contents in order to disclose their
counterhegemonic profile is highly relevant in our case, as it helps us to develop
a theoretical model through which the polyvocal nature of our materials — and
of the multiple identities they collect — is fully taken into account. Secondly, we
have to stress the relationship between the very nature of the amateur analog vi-
deos we are investigating and their archival life. The facts that their videos were
developed outside the professional realm, produced using consumer technology,
and referred to alternative production/fruition institutional contexts should en-
tail a different set of archival practices.
   First and foremost, for instance, if the main goal of a non-professional video
archive is to reconstruct not only the ‘correct version’ of an audiovisual text, but
also the social network that fostered its development (as we argued in reference
to the PVEH case study), then, in our cases, a strict separation between archival
institutions is nothing but a limitation: on the one hand, confronting the para-
textual sources would provide the users with a better understanding of the video
contents; on the other, ‘mixing up’ the collections would allow a more exhau-
stive reconstruction of the social fabric in which countercultural video-making
took shape in Bologna — more specifically, we could account for its inherent
complexity, underscoring also how the nuances of sexual (and gender) identities
stemmed from this fast-changing social turmoil. That is why the act of crossing

98
                         Queering the Amateur Analog Video Archive


over these audiovisual archives is also an act of challenging fixed identities and
social common places: in other words, this archival crossover, called transarchive,
can refer to an act of queering the archive.


Queering Archival Records

   LGBT amateur analog videos can claim for themselves a double layer of alter-
nativeness: on the one hand, we have, of course, the counterhegemonic stance of
audiovisual productions developed within a countercultural movement, whose
institutional boundaries reflect the basic assumptions of the struggle against ho-
mophobia and heterosexism; on the other, we have audio-visual products that re-
present the unstandardized and heterogeneous side of the ‘official’ cinema/video
realm. Indeed, as we can argue following Zimmermann, amateur videos allow us
to investigate ‘the more variegated and multiple practices of popular memory’
from polyvocal points of view, since they refer to a ‘visual practice emerging out
of dispersed, localized, and often minoritized cultures, not a practice imposed
on them’.21 In the intersecting perspectives of film history and social history, re-
searching amateur videos means to move away from ‘a single, metanarrative,
and omniscent viewpoint, based on referentiality, reality and facts that repress
heterogeneity, toward a more particularized, multicultural construct of plural
pasts.’ In other words, the inherent polyvocality of these materials can open up
‘historical analysis to different explanatory models’.22
   Through this perspective, we could affirm that amateur videos account for the
primary source of heterogeneity and singularity, which is everyday life. In our
particular case, we can observe a merging point in the daily life of a community,
where ordinariness meets social and political activism. In this way, the amateur
analog videos preserved at Il Cassero (as well as the PVEH Collection) make us
understand, for instance, not only how its members dealt with the AIDS crisis,
but also how, in those days, the community itself tried to improve the quality
of its members’ daily lives — see Cassero News, Bologna’s community ‘amateur
video-newsreel’, or GAY PANTERA ROSA and the topsy-turvy context of an
university occupation.
   So, when it comes to reflect upon the role of LGBT amateur analog videos in
an archive and the actual protocols that can be applied to them, we have to ac-
knowledge the main difference between their configurations in a LGBT archive
and in a queer archive. Both of them relate to audiovisual materials that dwell
at the crossroads of everyday life and political activism. Anyway, in the LGBT
archive it is crucial for these videos to reinforce specific identities, highlighting
how they took part in the creation of an overarching and all-encompassing com-
munity in an historical moment when it is necessary to legitimize the existence

21
     Zimmermann, p. 1.
22
     Ivi, p. 5.

                                                                                  99
                                Diego Cavallotti, Elisa Virgili


of non-heteronormative sexual orientations. In other words, the LGBT amateur
analog video archive displays a centripetal structure, in which its items should be
hypothetically ordered relating to the different parts of the community, creating
at the same time audiovisual repositories for the LGBT macro-identity.
   Instead, the queer archive tends to interpret these materials retrospectively as
documents of polymorphous, open, inclusive and multi-layered identities against
any form of normalization of LGBT memories.23 In this way, the queer archive
displays a centrifugal structure in which not only the internal boundaries (be-
tween the gay and bisexual identities, for instance), but also the external bounda-
ries are questioned. More specifically, through the notion of queer archive, we
can reflect on how an amateur video can become a hub for the inter-linkages
among different countercultural communities.
   The problem at stake here is thus how these hypothetical characteristics of the
amateur analog video queer archive can be transformed in actual features. How
can they be the distinctive marks of a framework that critiques and challenges
‘the normativizing collecting and circulating practices of other institutions’?
How can they bend the exertion of the power of consignation24 — which affects
not only the acquisition policies, but also how the archivists interpret these ama-
teur videos and how they order them — toward the open and dialogic practices
of the queer archive?
   Drawing on our case studies, we will focus on these questions, outlining a
‘double step’ process.


Step 1: Private/Public Dialectic

   When we think about amateur videos, we typically consider them as reservoirs
of private and intimate memories. Outside the enclosed context of family frui-
tion, these materials seem to be out of place. This is the reason why, when they
enter the archive, we think that a sort of archival violence is perpetrated against
them: they change their nature, becoming part of a publicly accessible institu-
tion. That’s only partially true, at least for two reasons. Firstly, the archive itself
does not always grant public access to the materials it stocks. Sometimes this is
in the name of preservation (when access is a threat to the item’s integrity) or for
power issues (the stakeholders decide that the item must not be accessed). From
this perspective, the archive is not a fully public institution: the ‘publicness’ of
its items is always negotiated with the community. Secondly, as our case studies
prove, many amateur analog videos were shown in semi-public fruition contexts.
   For instance, as we already noted, Cassero News (1990) was narrowcasted on
the bar TVs of the club, providing information and entertainment. Very often the


23
  Morris and Rawson, p. 84.
24
  Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1996), pp. 11–12.

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information delivered was strictly focused on the life of the cultural center. For
example, in its first edition the announcer reads the news regarding the nomina-
tion of Il Cassero’s board and introduces a video-report of the last national Arci-
gay conference. Although it was not mandatory to be gay, lesbian, bisexual or
transgender to get the club membership, it was highly improbable that someone
outside the selected audience of the community would be interested in Cassero
News: their fruition context was neither completely public nor completely pri-
vate.
    The same observations can be applied to GAY PANTERA ROSA. This video
was not supposed to be narrowcasted, since it was only a rough ‘video-draft’.
Ultimately it was edited, and a polished version of it was then included into the
fifteenth edition of Videogiornale — which, in turn, was narrowcasted on the
TVs of the occupied classrooms, where the students gathered together before
a TV-VCR system and watched their counter-informative newscast. This causes
some very complex issues. First, it is implausible that people outside Pantera’s
community watched it: non-leftist students were often considered as agitators
and asked to leave. Secondly, unfinished materials were not supposed to be nar-
rowcasted. They belonged to Videogiornale’s small archive, and could only have
been watched by the ‘video-journalists’. A further layer of ‘privateness’ emerges:
the privateness of a transitional material, the master-tape, which was expected
to remain sealed in Videogiornale’s metaphorical vault. So, if the screening mo-
dalities of these videos were semi-public (Cassero News) or semi-private (GAY
PANTERA ROSA), how can they be related to the access policies of the amateur
analog video queer archive, whose ‘radical openness’ challenges archival power?
    In our opinion, the point at stake here is how the queer archive faces two
issues. Paraphrasing Derrida, we can argue that, if there is no ‘archive without
consignation in an external place which assures the possibility of memorization,
of repetition, of reproduction, or of remission’,25 there is no archive without con-
signation power. How does the queer archive deal with procedures that risk to
keep stored materials secret and unaccessible? In the community’s semi-public
production and fruition contexts, we have tight personal relationships between
who shot the videos (or acted in them) and their audience: in other words, these
videos catalyse social and affective interactions, allowing for individual needs to
become visible. For instance, we might refer to a video from Il Cassero’s collec-
tion which was not produced under the supervision of K.G.B.&B., but rather
was a collaboration between Il Cassero’s lesbian groups: Lesbo qui, Lesbo là,
Lesbo tutta la città (VHS, 1994),26 shot during the first Italian National Pride
in Rome by Il Cassero’s lesbian activists. In its ‘amateurish’ flow of fragmented


25
  Ibidem.
26
   The video refers to an important political moment for the whole Italian movement and for
the lesbian part of it: as we stated before, the Rome Pride was the first National Pride; two years
later, in 1996, the lesbian members of the movement voted to create a separated organization,
Arcilesbica, that was nevertheless federated with Arcigay.

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                              Diego Cavallotti, Elisa Virgili


sequences, we can observe several participants re-performing (even parodying)
their own coming out, like the middle-aged woman who addresses the camera
and says ‘Hi, Mom! I’m a Lesbian!’. Although someone recorded these identity
performances onto a magnetic strip that could be narrowcasted everywhere (or
even broadcasted), they never crossed Il Cassero’s community boundaries and
remained within the limits of its safe space. Thus, when we theorize about the
relations between LGBT amateur videos and the inner features of the queer ar-
chive, about the latter’s inherent dialogicity and openness, we have to reflect on
what negotiating public access to these materials really means.
   Within this perspective, we have to account for another nuance of Zimmer-
mann’s polyvocality: the archive works as an ‘infinite activation of the record’27
that allows us to reconstruct its contents and the social context in which they took
shape. This process operates through several recontextualisations that take place
‘at every stage of a record’s life [in our case, during the inventory, the technical
restoration, the digitization, and the cataloguing phases] and in every dimension
of the records continuum, adding values (or subtracting values) to the record’.28
The notion of ‘wide access’ is crucial for this infinite reactivation process: it is a
phase in which an archive that challenges ‘centripetal’ policies transforms what
is usually considered as an archival asset into a public, broadly disseminated and
disposable good, which is open to new interpretations and historiographical hy-
potheses. Although they could crack the boundaries of a restricted community,
they allow a better understanding of its inner dynamics as well.
   In the case of the analog video queer archive, this issue becomes very relevant.
The queered record/document cannot be simply stored. When it becomes acces-
sible, it becomes open to a wide range of hermeneutical manipulations: research-
ers that link the archival record to unexpected historical and cultural phenom-
ena, mobilizing new forms of counter-history; activists (or former activists) that
connect the item to their lives (and their social networks), creating new forms
of counter-memory; archivists that relate collections to each other, although they
belong to different archives, giving rise to new forms of counter-archiviality. In
other words, the negotiation of consignation power and public access signals
the relevance of ‘wide access’ as a countercultural approach to the queer amateur
video archive: through its inner complexity and fluidity we aim at (re)construct-
ing social and cultural counter-networks. In the last part of our paper, we will
focus on a specific counter-archival typology: queer transarchiviality.


Step 2: Queer Transarchiviality

   The queer archive constructs a memorial space whose items show how audio-
visual materials that are often discarded as cheap and valueless can in fact work

27
     Ketelaar, p. 137.
28
     Ibidem.

102
                       Queering the Amateur Analog Video Archive


as aggregators of a complex and fluid memory. Its features tend to challenge the
semi-public (or semi-private) nature of our case studies. Thus, the analog video
queer archive should be deemed as a framework in which the dialectic of priva-
cy/publicness represents a constitutive dynamic and not a problem to be solved:
this polar tension can mobilize new interpretations on LGBT countermemories
by casting light on what was deemed appropriate for these semi-public videos in
those days, and what a public function can do for the LGBTQIA+ community
now. The public/private dialectic works as specific feature of the ‘technology of
memory’29 the archive helps to shape, creating a disseminated memory that has
built, and continues to build, the identity of the movement.
   This ‘technology of memory’ and its ‘reactivation processes’ involve not only
the different facets of the LGBT community, but also those ‘neighbour’ com-
munities in which LGBT activists took part — in our cases, especially when
we think about Cassero News and GAY PANTERA ROSA, Bologna’s student
movement. Crossing over the collections they belong to, we can reflect upon a
crucial fact: both the gay and lesbian (and, more broadly, LGBT) and the leftist
countercultural identities seemed to be (in those days in Italy) synchronically
mobilized. That’s why transarchiviality, the act of crossing over collections pre-
served in different archives, can be a useful tool when, for example, we have to
investigate the life of an activist such as Vincenzo Tallarico (who was part both of
Il Cassero’s and Pantera’s communities) and we have to account for the complex
nature of his social networks.
   Making public material that was (originally) semi-public/semi-private, and
opening up the strict boundaries between different archives and linking their
collections together means, first of all, to deny the ‘centripetal’ nature of the
LGBT archive and to point out at the intersections between sexual orientation
matters and broader political identity issues.
   Another example of the transarchival usefulness is PVEH’s Sfilata Daniele
19/7/94 (VHS, 1994). Miss Italia Alternative’s first edition, a man-in-drag beauty
contest organized by Stefano Casagrande for fund-raising purposes (AIDS aware-
ness), is included in this video. Daniele Del Pozzo, a former member of Videogior-
nale’s crew and Il Cassero’s activist, was among the participants: here we can find
another superimposing layer that links our case studies to the social fabric that
outline their backgrounds. Del Pozzo worked on several Videogiornale produc-
tions, even when its members decided to follow different research pathways. He
and Lino Greco (another member of Videogiornale), for example, worked on a
found-footage video called Blue Movie (VHS, 1993), whose main concept was a
visual study on the relationship between the image-as-matter and the body.
   As we can see, the individual pathways of each activist, student or videomaker
draw a centrifugal map, in which none of them belong to just one social group. If
these amateur videos hint at a such complex framework, their archival lives should

29
  Marita Sturken, Tangled Memories: The Vietnam War, the AIDS Epidemic, and the Politics of
Remembering (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of Californa Press, 1997), pp. 9–12.

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                                 Diego Cavallotti, Elisa Virgili


not downgrade their entropy: preservation practices and access policies should
work against every ‘centripetal’ consignation power30 and facilitate the crossover of
video collections — in other words, they should facilitate a queer transarchiviality.
   Queer transarchiviality points to the establishment of an intersecting access
frameworks in which the materials preserved in the LGBT archive could engage
in dialogue with those stored in other archives, creating a queer transarchive.
Here, the notion of ‘wide access’ becomes a relevant enhancer for the (re)con-
struction of social-affective frames: it entails a multiplication of historiographi-
cal interpretations because every archival user (academic researchers, activists,
etc.) can elaborate inter-linkages between different collections (and different ar-
chives) drawing on her/his historical knowledge or her/his memory. Every link-
age is based on ‘affinity recognition’: videos belonging to different collections
(and different archives) must have something in common, even on a very basic
level — their content, for instance.
   That is how the queer transarchive becomes more than a neutral mediator be-
tween the item’s original context and contemporary researchers: the record is al-
ways manipulated and (re)constructed, and so is its functional context. In other
words, the structure of the queer transarchive does not simply entail a batch of
fixed, unquestionable and non-invasive protocols. Since it underscores the rel-
evance of cross-boundary and fluid intersections between collections, archives,
and social frameworks, it helps us to understand that every LGBT person has
always been part of a wider social context and that she/he has always been com-
pelled to negotiate her/his identity with it. In our cases, Il Cassero’s and Bolo-
gna’s broader countercultural communities are inherently co-implicated, and so
should be their audiovisual amateur archives, which witness the daily lives of
their members. This is why (re)constructing and reactivating a record shapes
new possible (counter)memories.
   Not by chance, when Cook and Schwartz, two postmodern archival theorists,
deconstruct the ‘archival neutrality paradigm’, they account for Butler’s theory
of performativity. Cook and Schwartz affirm that archival practices are based on
repetition and ritual, through which a naturalization of archival ‘codes of behav-
iour and belief’31 is established. Those naturalized codes rule thanks to the ‘tacit
narratives’ of the archive, transforming notions such as the sacredness of the
vault and the predominance of preservation over access into scientific dogma.
‘Yet routinized performance/practice, and the beliefs/theories that sustain it [...]
can be shaken when social contexts become more fluid’:32 then, they can be chal-
lenged by ‘transgressive performances’33 that open new theoretical spaces and


30
   Derrida, pp. 11–12.
31
   Terry Cook and Joan M. Schwartz, ‘Archives, Records, and Power: From (Postmodern) Theory
to (Archival) Performance’, Archival Science, 2.3 (2002), 171–85 (p. 173).
32
   Ivi, p. 176.
33
   Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge,
1999), pp. 173–180.

104
                           Queering the Amateur Analog Video Archive


make old practices more inclusive. This change also involves, of course, archival
power, which ‘loses much of its authority’.34
   Queer transarchiviality, in our opinion, belongs to the realm of ‘transgressive
performances’. As we can see, crossing over collections that belong to differ-
ent archives raises our awareness about the multi-layered social and affective
linkages between the LGBT movement and other movements, making them vis-
ible — and this is vital for non-researchers. Queer transarchiviality discloses how
complex social interactions in the LGBT community have always been. They
involve first of all the daily lives of people — their bodies, their stories — who
cross paths with many other social and cultural groups: queering an analog video
archive means, thus, to open it and to connect it to other archival frameworks, to
deal with different spaces, with the ‘inside’ and the ‘outside’ of a community, and
also with different temporalities. In other words, queering the archive means to
queer temporalities: to retrospectively queer the past and to re-write history for
the contemporary LGBT(QIA+) community.




34
     Cook and Schwartz, p. 177.

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