By Toni Serra-Abu Ali (OVNI)

The OVNI Collective works in “an-archiving.” Here, I’ll explain how we came to that decision.

“We were preparing to hold our film festival,“The Colonial Dream,” in 2006. This led us to consult archives that were incredibly difficult to consult. Many of them took hundreds of steps to access, and the film libraries here in Catalonia and in Madrid were impenetrable, as were the television stations. We had been blind to the fact that accessing archives is fundamentally linked to power and the construction of narratives. And we saw that each document we could access had a value — as much value as the statue here in the city of Antonio López — which we un-archived, or “an-archived.” The files we were gathering, however, weren’t monuments but the archeology of people’s lives; it wasn’t the macro but the micro, it wasn’t one source but the product of a thousand sources. That is also why OVNI is about the unidentified and without borders. OVNI is this whole network of all these authors, because there are many ways to work as a group, and one way of working as a group is when you see a video and you spend years thinking about it.