About

Enthusiasts: archive
A project by Neil Cummings and Marysia Lewandowska

This archive is the result of extensive research among the remnants of amateur film clubs in Poland under socialism. Enthusiasts: archive is a critical archive of beautiful amateur films found, restored and made available to you. 

Presented as a collaborative artwork, Enthusiasts: archive enables you to explore how the generosity of the enthusiast reveals a range of interests and experiences generally invisible amid the breathless flow of the state-sponsored or professionally mediated. 

Through our founding of Enthusiasts: archive as an artwork, we intend to challenge creative practices, to replace exchanges facilitated by frustration and restriction with exchanges of collaboration and generosity. We want to reanimate the public function of archives, collections and exhibitions in an age characterized by relentless privatization, and to initiate new practices of exhibition, so that exhibition is reconfigured as a conscious site of creative exchange for collaborative negotiation over the ‘making’ and remaking of the work of art.

Our intention with Enthusiasts: archive is to stimulate interest in and discussion of the nature of creative exchange, the function of public archives, and the future of the public domain.