Insider/Outsider: The Feminist Archive as Documentary Practice in the Fifth Wall

This essay reads Die fünfte Wand (the Fifth Wall, 2021–2023), a digital archive that brings together films, reportage, texts, letters, and photographs by the filmmaker and editor Navina Sundaram, as a way of doing feminist archival practice in the digital form. By consolidating a variety of media, the Fifth Wall situates itself as an action-based archive that is the site of collective labor and as an archive of feelings. Bringing together a reading of documentary force within the archive, the essay closely reads the formal structure of the Fifth Wall to arrive at a form of feminist praxis and commons, as a memorial to forgotten histories within broadcast television and a memorial to lifelong friendship and collectivity forged through creative archival work.