CAMP, a Mumbai Artists’ Collective, Redefines the Archive

Back in 1997, with India celebrating 50 years of independence, artist Shaina Anand accompanied filmmaker Saeed Mirza on a journey travelling across the country, listening to and filming stories about the day-to-day lives of India’s citizens. Their journey culminated in Mirza’s A Tryst with the People of India (1997), an episodic documentary telecast on India’s public TV channel. 

As an assistant director, Anand stayed up at night logging and cataloging all the day’s footage: noting names of speakers, tagging locations, summarizing what each person said at this significant moment in the national history. The inception of CAMP, the artist studio she cofounded with Sanjay Bhangar and Ashok Sukumaran in Mumbai in 2007, was still a decade away. 

But the seeds had been planted. 

CAMP’s manifesto from 2007 begins with a wish “to consider thresholds of ownership and authority as challenging sites for artistic practice.”¹ Today, CAMP’s collaborative video and public art projects interrogate the assumed and easy relationship between author, viewer, and technology. Their work disrupts the power structure that exists between the person who holds the camera and the person who stands in front of it. 

Through images, words, and videos, CAMP strives to create an ecosystem where the ideas of search and re-search are met with rigor and labor, and eschews a world where people turn to a state-controlled body (national archives), hegemonic power structures (academic archives), or tech conglomerates (internet search engines). In its archives, there are no search options for author and director. 

With its archives, CAMP creates knowledge storing and sharing structures that aim to be democratic and equitable. They create what Anand describes as “architectures of knowledge” that are generous and independent. CAMP’s autonomous and open-sourced existence offers a radical research alternative, especially within the context of ever-growing state censorship in India. “Any historian of Indian cinema must confront head-on the problem of the absent archive. Of all the films made in the Indian subcontinent between 1920 and 1950, less than 5% are preserved at the National Film Archives of India (NFAI),” writes film scholar Debashree Mukherjee.²

In an interview with Seen, Anand looked back at those hours of logging footage for A Tryst as “feminist care” that she employed to the “housekeeping” she did every night with the day’s work. It is the same arc of labor that finds fruition in Pad.ma, a CAMP project driven by an interest in the afterlife of images. Short for Public Access Digital Media Archive, Pad.ma was created to see what exists beyond the limits of a finished film, and what remains to be seen beyond the screen. 

The 8,000+ videos in Pad.ma are all in the public domain, searchable by keywords, sources, people, places, and themes. When a Pad.ma user adds an annotation to the archived footage, it’s an act of writing one’s context and history into an image without the need for permission or approval. Annotating, Anand says, makes the clip fair use. The filmmakers who share their footage see it as an act of solidarity. 

Moving away from a centralized national authority, the archive remains untethered to the finality of a “finished” film product. Instead of including completed films, Pad.ma focuses on archive footage that’s gathered with the intention of feminist care. 

This focus on archive footage also has its roots in the epic journey Anand took back in 1997 while working on A Tryst. During the day, the invasive filmmaking practice of entering a village, as she describes it, “with a beta cam and a boom rod,” even by the best-intentioned Indian filmmakers, stood in direct contrast to the readings that grounded Anand’s practice as a young, postcolonial filmmaker: Trinh T. Minh-ha talking of speaking nearby³ (as opposed to “speaking about” cultures and experiences outside of one’s own), Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak asking if the subaltern could speak⁴ (thereby pointing to knowledge structures that speak for those historically underrepresented within those structures, effectively silencing them), Linda Alcoff writing about the problem of speaking for others⁵ (which argues that a speaker’s location of privilege will always affect the meaning and authenticity of what is said).

Her nighttime cataloging allowed for a slow reading and watching of the footage, which helped her gather a granular view of everything that was filmed. This “nuanced state” of the footage, for Anand, carried context and meaning that would usually get lost in the zoomed-out, larger landscape of a film’s narrative. She imagined a future where, instead of watching finished films as research and inspiration, people could also refer to archived footage, to see what had already been filmed and recorded, before setting out to film on their own. The goal would be for artists to step away from embarking on a solitary creative pursuit and instead learn of a possible artistic legacy.

For instance, Anand Patwardhan’s Bombay: Our City (1985) is often cited as the seminal first film on Mumbai’s housing crisis. But Pad.ma’s archive widens that lens of research and points to the more commercial fiction films of K. A. Abbas and Raj Kapoor that all touch on the crisis. The annotations of Shree 420 (1955) and Naya Sansar (1941) in CAMP’s archives highlight the early films made on the crisis and also make note of films made during India’s mid-1970s Emergency⁶ that are now lost. 

The idea, Anand says, is not to contest Patwardhan but to not forget the ones who came before him. It’s about all of us standing on the shoulders of each other, she says. A film, quite like a moment in history, is never a complete reflection of its time but an invitation for continuity and conversation. Preserving footage through Pad.ma therefore, opens up unconstrained wide spaces for a community to study history, to play and engage with it before going on to create something that will add to the narrative. 

“For me, I always thought, if we look at footage, maybe we will film differently,” Anand says. Archived footage is a reminder of what already exists; it is what future filmmakers and researchers can study before going on to unearth and record what doesn’t yet exist on film. Pad.ma is not an unquestionable, terminating knowledge source but rather a space that strives to create a culture of meaning-making that comes together over years. Never complete but inching towards a more fulfilled knowledge system.

One always distills from the footage as an artist, Anand says: “You will finesse it and present [a film] like a finite thing to the world,” but Pad.ma’s push was to “take that one step forward and say, ‘Films need to be beautiful.’ Not just on the outside, but on the inside as well, in form and process and modes of engagement.” The obsession with a finished film creates a whole less-cared-for world of “what gets left on the edit floor.” Pad.ma’s job is to take that world and pick it up from the floor—and then treat it with attention, engage with it, and use it to strengthen scholarship. And all of it is possible because of the labor and solidarity of cultural workers.

The project, initially supported by a seed grant from Hivos, is supported by its contributors and foundational grants. Scholars from film studies departments across the world contribute to the archive and then use it as a resource in their teaching of film analysis. What emerges is a free system of academic and intellectual exchange that exists and thrives outside of the capitalist structures of Western academia that have always “spoken for” visual cultures of the global South in the very limited vocabulary of their making.   

The raw footage and soundtracks from filmmaker Anand Gandhi’s 2012 film Ship of Theseus is entirely available on the archive. The sharing, Pad.ma notes, opens up a “new way to see how the film was made” and allows “for pedagogic experiments in film editing and film direction.” To show care for footage is to keep playing it—not just to keep it from being forgotten, but to see it as a means of expanding knowledge through sharing, discussing, and contextualizing it.

In Pad.ma, footage has “already been read over, it’s already been seen, it’s already been cared for,” Anand says. In the layering of annotation, she sees a relationship emerge between the archive’s curators, annotators, and audience. The idea of reading film as text, as defined by academic processes, is often a solitary and subjective one. Pad.ma upends that idea of a singular critic and makes analysis a communal activity.

“Research should not be a punishment at all,” Anand says. “It’s so simple. It is so easy to archive and to do this, and do it as a community and as people in solidarity. And not, therefore, depending on Google or an AI bot. And that’s all we are trying to say.”