Fairouz Nouri
Cinema has organised itself around a single threshold: the final cut. Once a film is locked, everything that preceded that decision, alternate takes, unused footage, discarded drafts, is treated as production waste, not as material of consequence. Sitting in a media art workshop at SEE Djerba, I found myself listening to a room propose the opposite: that this excluded material is an archive in its own right, and that the act of excluding it is itself worth sitting with, as an editorial habit and as a collective ritual. What follows stays with that workshop, its disagreements, its metaphors, and the case it settled on, and follows where the same question later took me.
The name attached to the inquiry, Buqya, describes a specific thing: the glow that stays behind closed eyes after looking at a light. It is a borrowing from cinema’s own self-description, the idea that the illusion of movement on a screen is a trick of residue, an afterimage the eye keeps holding onto after the frame has already changed. Whether that is the correct physiological account of how film actually works has been argued over for decades, but the feeling it names is not in dispute. To build an archive project around that residue is to propose that a film’s excluded material keeps acting on meaning long after its formal exclusion, whatever the exact mechanism turns out to be.
The conversation circled this same territory without needing to name a single theorist. Editing, several participants agreed, means choosing, and choosing is difficult because something viable always has to be sacrificed for something else to survive. Iskandar Amor described post-production as a kind of rewriting, and argued that once a film is finished it has an age, like anything alive, and ought to be left as a memorial, not continually reopened. Hamza Chebbi pushed back from his own footing in plastic art, insisting a film never truly finishes at its final cut because it can always be reopened as research. Anas Nahla went further still, arguing a film ends only once its impact in the world runs out, which unsettles the reason a film gets made if its real life continues somewhere past the screen. It was Safi Sakaran’s remark that I kept returning to afterward: “the archive is not dead material”, he said. It is alive. Listening back, I think that argument sits near something Jacques Derrida once put more formally: “that every archive is built by what it leaves out as much as by what it keeps”, and that this leaving-out is a kind of violence built into archiving itself, not an accident of it.
Underneath the disagreement about whether a film is closed or ongoing, I kept noticing a second distinction worth pulling out. Some archives simply sit in storage, present but dormant, consulted rarely if at all. Others stay active because a community keeps returning to them, reworking them, folding them back into new use. A finished film does not stop being an archive once it is locked; it slides from the second kind into the first, dormant, not gone, until something, an artist, a workshop, a rediscovery, pulls a fragment of it back into active use.
The workshop’s second recurring question, what happens once a screen is no longer the only tool available for a cinematic experience, is where the debate stopped being abstract for me. Cinema has spent most of its history bound to a fixed architecture: a dark hall, rows of seats, a rectangle everyone in the room faces together. What the workshop proposed was that a film’s afterlife might not need that architecture at all, that a projection could leave the screen entirely and enter the same space, the same walls, the same object that produced the footage in the first place.
Yosr Amar, Feriel Mosbeh and Youssef Ban Hamda’s short documentary on Djerba’s weaving workshops had, like every film, left behind footage that never made the final cut: close shots of the weavers’ hands, movements too small or too slow to hold a documentary’s pace. They turned that leftover footage into The Weaving Workshop, an installation for SEE Djerba’s 2026 edition that reopens an abandoned weaving workshop on the island and projects those hand gestures, recorded into light and sound, directly onto its architecture. For three days, visitors move through a building that had fallen out of use and find it inhabited again by the film’s own discarded gestures, given back to the space and the community they came from. The artists themselves framed it to me as a node, a point where past and present, craft and contemporary practice, memory and a living public, meet again inside the same walls. It is an archive that has been handed a second life on Djerba’s own public ground, and standing inside it, I understood the workshop’s question was no longer abstract.
This is where the workshop’s question stopped belonging only to editing, for me, and became the starting point for something I have since made my own. My intention is to ask how the gesture of giving an archive a second life changes depending on who performs it and what they are working with. Watching Yosr’s installation, and thinking back across the rest of what I encountered at Djerba that year, artists rebuilding heritage out of found material, others working through ecological or ritual memory, I began to treat the editorial choice itself, what an artist keeps, cuts, reframes, or invents from their own archive, as a form of authorship, not an incidental detail of how each work was made. My instinct, going forward, is to follow this through the curatorial structures that bring such artists together in the first place, the way a festival like Djerba does, since it is often the exhibition itself, not any single practice, that puts one archive in dialogue with another and makes the differences between them visible.
What this opens onto for me, and what the workshop leaves open in turn, is a harder question. I usually imagine an archive as something that already exists, a shelf, a folder, an institution’s holding, waiting to be consulted. Nothing discussed in that room was waiting anywhere. The unused footage, the abandoned workshop, the discarded gesture, none of it was an archive until someone decided to treat it as one. What, then, actually authorises that decision, and who gets to make it. What do I owe to the people whose gestures, labour, or memory become the material being given a second life, particularly when they are not the ones deciding to give it one. And does an archive that has been reactivated ever stop being a record of what was once excluded, or does it become the site of a new exclusion, since choosing one gesture, one building, one artist’s forgotten footage still means passing over everything that remains forgotten. These are not questions the workshop, or my own research, has settled yet. They are the questions I intend to keep asking.