Cinenova is a London-based volunteer-run organisation dedicated to preserving and distributing the work of women / feminist film and video makers. Cinenova currently distributes over 500 titles that include experimental film, narrative feature films, artists’ film and video, documentary and educational videos made from the 1920s to the present. The thematics in these titles include oppositional histories, post-colonial struggles, reproductive labour, representation of gender and sexuality and importantly, the relations and alliances between these different struggles.

Cinenova was founded in 1991 following the merger of two feminist film and video distributor, Circles and Cinema of Women, each formed in the early 1980s. Since all funding for the organisation was cut in 2001, Cinenova has been run by volunteers dedicated to the constellation of films, histories and politics that make up Cinenova, believing in the necessity of keeping the collection together and autonomous, rather than dispersed into larger and more general archives. The Cinenova Working Group came together in 2009 with the intention of making Cinenova’s practical situation with regard to its ability to preserve, promote and distribute the work in the collection public and urgent.

For Group Affinity the Cinenova Working Group, in this instance lead by Melissa Castagnetti, Irene Revell, and Megan Fraser, will open these discussions up with the participants and present Cinenova as a site in which to reflect upon the desires and problematics that arise in collective cultural work and the practicalities and labour involved in maintaining such an organisation, its past its possibilities now and how we might project things in the future.

picture credits:
Group Affinity, 2011. Installation views Kunstverein München e.V., 2011. Courtesy Kunstverein München e.V., photographs by: Ulrich Gebert