The Agency of a Home Movie Fragment in the Context of the Archive

This article follows a fragment of a collection of home movies through different exhibition contexts and artistic reappropriations within the framework of the Traça project, promoted by the Arquivo Municipal Videoteca de Lisboa [Municipal Archive Videoteca of Lisbon]. The article draws on Roger Odin’s semio-pragmatic approach (2022) describing what happens to home movies when they migrate from the private context of the family to the public communicative space of the archive. The paper argues that the agency of home movies expresses itself in different ways through various modes of reading images. In particular, it argues that in the “archival curatorial” mode, which here is proposed as the privileged mode for understanding the montages created by the curators of the archive, the fragments function not as evidence but as a means of revealing the “grammar of home movies.”