This project seeks to redress the historical imbalances perpetuated by traditional archival institutions by creating a community-based archive devoted entirely to the Cypriot Canadian diaspora. Audiovisual in nature, this archive foregrounds personally recorded interviews with members of the community while also working with donated media materials from across a variety of platforms, such as home movies, videotapes, and photographs. These interviews and artifacts emphasize the importance of film as a mediator of memory and history. In turn, these items help to reconceptualize our understanding of Cypriots in this country and demonstrate audiovisual media’s power as a form of historiography.
Principal Investigator
Theo Xenophontos is a PhD candidate in the Cinema & Media studies program at York University. He holds a BA from the University of Toronto (double major in Cinema Studies and English, with a minor in History) and a MA in Cinema & Media Studies from York University. He currently works for the Hellenic Heritage Foundation Greek Canadian Archives and is working to establish their Cypriot Canadian collection. Previously, he has worked with such organizations as Archive/Counter-Archive and Vtape. His writing can be read in Found Footage Magazine and Ergon.
theox@yorku.ca | Twitter | Linkedin
Features
Theo Xenophontos, “Film as Mediator.” Archive/Counter-Archive Working Paper Series (October 2022)