More insights from the past: the London Community Video Archive is a fantastic showcase of the work being made in the 1970s when video technology was just coming into reach. It includes films, documents and interviews, that I’ve only just begun to explore. The site is powerful evidence of the potential of cultural democracy and, with the passage of time, an evocative social history that opens many questions about how London and Britain has changed in the past half century. Highly recommended for anyone interested in community art.
Based at Goldsmiths University and the BFI, London Community Video Archive (LCVA) will preserve, archive and share community videos made in the 1970s/80s in London Portable video recording — now a technology routinely embodied in smartphones — became available for the very first time back in the early 1970s, making it possible for individuals and communities to make their own television. The medium was taken up by people ignored or under-represented in the mainstream media – tenants on housing estates, community action groups, women, black and minority ethnic groups, youth, gay and lesbian people, and the disabled. With an overriding commitment to social empowerment and to combating exclusion, ‘Community Video’ dealt with issues which still have a contemporary resonance — housing, play-space, discrimination, youth arts.
François Matarasso 