Action-based Archivism: A Conversation with Mareike Bernien, Madhusree Dutta and Merle Kroeger

Madhusree Dutta is a filmmaker, curator, and author who works from Mumbai and Berlin/Cologne. She prefers to call herself a cultural producer. She was the executive director of Majlis Culture Centre in Mumbai (1990–2016) and artistic director of Academy of the Arts of the World (ADKDW) in Cologne, Germany (2018–2021). She has initiated several public art and archive projects within, and also outside, Majlis and ADKDW.

Merle Kröger was a member of the group dogfilm from 1992 to 1999 and has been a member of pong film since 2001. As a writer, she works with Philip Scheffner on feature films such as Europe (2022). She has published five novels, most recently Die Experten (2021). These combine historical research and political analysis with elements of crime fiction. The digital archive The Fifth Wall, co-created with Mareike Bernien, was nominated for the Grimme Online Award in 2022.

Alexandra Schneider is Professor of Film and Media Studies at the Johannes Gutenberg-University Mainz. She is a co-founder of NECS—European Network for Cinema and Media Studies. She is a member of the DFG Research Training Group “Configurations of film” and works on questions of film historiographies, amateur media, and digital media cultures. In 2020, she co-edited Format Matters. Standards, Practices and Politics in Media Cultures (meson press) with Marek Jancovic and Axel Volmar.