Against Archival Amnesia: Ratna Asmara and Collective Acts of Recovery is a performance lecture that explores archival activism as a feminist practice of rewriting cinema history. Centering the recovery of Ratna Asmara—Indonesia’s first woman film director—the work examines how Kelas Liarsip’s collective archival interventions challenge the historical erasure of women filmmakers within both Indonesian and global film historiography.

Drawing on Kelas Liarsip’s research, film digitization, and public knowledge dissemination undertaken between 2022 and 2026, the performance demonstrates that archives are not neutral repositories of the past but contested sites where histories are continuously produced, forgotten, and reclaimed. By tracing the collective labor behind recovering Ratna Asmara’s legacy, the work proposes feminist historiography as an ongoing practice of care, solidarity, and resistance against archival amnesia.

The performance was dramaturged and visually conceived by Umi Lestari. The script was written and performed by Umi Lestari, Julita Pratiwi, and Efi Sri Handayani of Kelas Liarsip, with video editing by Mahardika Yudha.

Against Archival Amnesia: Ratna Asmara and Collective Acts of Recovery premiered at the 3rd Global Audiovisual Archiving (GAVA) Conference, held at the Thai Film Archive, Thailand, on 15 June 2026.