Pad.ma (Public Access Digital Media Archive) is not merely an online repository but a counter-archive that redefines how visual material—particularly video footage—is accessed, interpreted, and politicised within the Global South, acting as a non-state, open-access initiative that foregrounds dense annotation as both a method of critique and a means of resistance, offering a searchable and viewable interface where footage—not finished films—becomes the primary object of inquiry, allowing for multiple readings, situated annotations and layered forms of “writing” on the moving image; its innovative design enables contributors to embed keywords, locations, and transcribed dialogue directly into the video timeline, thereby generating non-linear, multi-voiced narratives that challenge dominant forms of spectatorship, and offering tools to read what conventional documentary and broadcast forms tend to marginalise or erase, as exemplified in projects like The Radia Tap(e)s, which expose the entanglements of media, lobbying, and state power through granular audiovisual documentation, placing the viewer within a forensic structure of interpretation, and positioning Pad.ma not just as a digital storage site, but as a discursive space where political memory, archival ethics, and activist historiography converge; initiated in 2007 by collectives such as CAMP (Mumbai), 0x2620 (Berlin), and Alternative Law Forum (Bangalore), and supported by grants from HIVOS, Bohen Foundation, and Foundation for Arts Initiatives, the platform embodies a distributed authorship and radical transparency that stands in sharp contrast to algorithmically curated, commodified visual cultures, inviting users not only to view but to intervene, annotate, and thus re-author visual history as a form of shared memory and social critique.
