Capillary, Migratory, Projective: Inventing Cinema’s Past So That It May Have a Future. An Introduction

Stefanie Schulte Strathaus is the artistic director of Arsenal – Institute for Film and Video Art in Berlin. From 2001 to 2019 she was a member of the selection committee of the Berlinale Forum. From 2006 to 2020 she was the founding director of the Berlinale section Forum Expanded. She curated film exhibitions, such as “LIVE FILM! JACK SMITH! Five Flaming Days in A Rented World” (2009, with Susanne Sachsse and Marc Siegel), „A Paradise Built in Hell“ (2014, with Bettina Steinbrügge), and “From Behind the Screen” (2018), as well as research and exhibition projects such as “Living Archive – Archive Work as a Contemporary Artistic and Curatorial Practice“ (2010–2013) and “Archive außer sich” (2017–2022). In 2021 she launched the biennial festival “Archival Assembly“. Her work is dealing with the intersections of film restoration, exhibition and distribution, focussing on collaborative and decolonial thinking and practice. Schulte Strathaus is serving on the boards of the Harun Farocki Institut and the Master program Film Culture at the University in Jos/Nigeria.