INA in Saint-Rémy-l'Honoré: where the walls have ears
Christian Gomis, director of the INA archives conservation center which contains one and a half million radio archives.
© Céline Develay-Mazurelle / RFI
By: Céline Develay Mazurelle Follow
3 min
On the occasion of the Radio Festival, we immerse ourselves in the heart of the memory of the waves, in a place like no other: the Archives Conservation Center of the National Audiovisual Institute (INA).
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Located in the Chevreuse valley, in the middle of rapeseed fields and the great plains of Yvelines, the places look like a secret base, where behind high fences, crazy inventions are played out, even the fate of the world. When you have the chance to enter it, it is a little what you discover or almost, discovering millions of audiovisual archives, but especially technicians and inventive conservation agents, passionate about old tapes. and archives, which inventory, clean and restore this treasure of French public radio and television, one of the oldest and richest archives in the world.
There, on 8 hectares, are deployed nearly twenty sheds stuffed from floor to ceiling with magnetic tapes, old films, 78 rpm records or cassettes, testimonies of a time when memory took up space and where the radio was called Poste Colonial, RTF or even ORTF, to the point of saying that it was free after the liberalization of the airwaves in 1981. In parallel with the vast digitization and safeguard plan launched by the INA, here we still jealously watch over these physical supports, fragile and unique witnesses of the past century.
In all, nearly 3 million media are stored there in nearly 14,000 m2 of stores: a well-organized maze, air-conditioned to 12 or 18 degrees, where the history of radio is also told.
A report by Céline Develay-Mazurelle on the occasion of 100 years of radio.
Useful links:
- To travel through the digital archives
on the INA website
- To watch
the documentary mini-series “Bonnes Ondes”
produced by INA on the radio, machine of emotions
- Find out more about the 1st edition
of the Radio Festival
which takes place from May 31 to June 6, 2021.
In the stores of Saint-Rémy, the radio archives date back to the 1930s. © Céline Develay-Mazurelle / RFI
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