From the Editor
A collection of artworks constitutes only one half of the treasures of an archive or a museum. The other half is the expertise, the scholarship, the creativity of those who work in the organisation. Creativity provides meaning, understanding, interpretation to what would otherwise be perceived as mere content, the equivalent of a product on the shelves of a cultural supermarket. The National Film and Sound Archive has given itself a new structure based on the principle of curatorship, precisely because it believes that a dynamic interaction between the collecting institution and the public is a key element of its mandate.
This journal is the expression of our commitment to develop such dialogue through the discussion of recorded sound and moving image culture from an archival perspective. We will do so without any concession to nostalgia, technical jargon, or theoretical elitism. Our aim is to make the work of the NFSA - acquiring, preserving and presenting moving images and sound recordings - accessible to a wider audience. We will be open to all kinds of scholarly and intellectual perspectives, as long as their underlying ideas are expressed clearly and in good faith.
The four collections of the NFSA (Documents and Artefacts, Indigenous, Moving Image, Recorded Sound), as well as the philosophical rationale behind its activities, will be our main areas of concern, and the NFSA curatorial team will be directly engaged in the development of the journal. However, we will be open to other contributions from colleagues, students and practitioners in the field. There will be no geographic boundaries, no chronological barriers, no off-limits territories of curatorial research. More importantly, we don't have to agree with what's being published in our pages. Even in the areas of recorded sound and screen culture, we firmly believe that the most desirable cultural landscape is the one where freedom of debate is seen as important as consensus.
We are deliberately starting on a small scale. This doesn't mean that we don't have ambitions for the future of our journal; however, its success will depend on our ability to demonstrate that our work can speak to specialists and non-specialists with equally compelling arguments. We see no reason why a technical paper should make itself inaccessible to someone who is interested in the topic but is unfamiliar with technology; conversely, we don't believe that a subject is too popular to deserve curatorial attention.
What matters to us is being able to convince that an archive of moving images and recorded sounds can be the coolest thing on earth if you open its doors with curiosity and enthusiasm. True knowledge always begins with a sense of suprise.
- Paolo Cherchi Usai
