Paradojas y desafí­os del patrimonio audiovisual televisivo. Tres casos de estudio del Archivo Histórico de RTA

Abstract

This work deals with the analysis of the paradoxes and the challenges that the patrimonialization of the television archives supposes, taking as axis the experience of the Archivo Histórico de Radio y Televisión Argentina. In the first place, the singularities of the television medium as both cultural technology (Williams, 2001) and discourse (González Requena, 1995), the historical vicissitudes of its archival practice, the inherent contradictions of a patrimonialization process that makes it a uncomfortable heritage (Prats, 1997; Reventós Gil de Biedma, 2007), and the range of possibilities implied by its re-functionalization as a zombie heritage (Herní ndez i Martí­, 2008) are studied. In the second instance, a brief tour of the history of television archives in Argentina is made, paying special attention to the recent creation of the Archivo Histórico de RTA. Finally, three case studies of this institution are examined with the purpose of observing the multiplicity of ways in which these paradoxes and challenges are put into play. From this it can be inferred that when, towards the end of the 20th century, a convergence of economic, state and social demands began to focus on the cultural value of television, patrimonial policies encountered a series of vicissitudes that, in broad terms, were synthesized in the contradictions that the audiovisual archive implies as an archaeological practice, the discomfort that the revaluation of historically denigrated contents supposes and the re-functionalization of them in a strange context of the original.