The practices of video and its multiple uses have experienced a remarkable increase in the art and cultural field during the last decades. The medium, as its systems derived from technological changes in the information and communication field, represents a prolific ground of study and work for visual artists and researchers. This has built new audiovisual practices, setting up other ways of relating with the spectators and the publics. Likewise, non-lineal-edition has been expanded thanks to the rise of low-cost technology. Accessible cameras and computer devices fostered democratization, drifting to experimental practices and new artistic languages. Digital art is constantly evolving, and its heritage it’s vulnerable by nature. Thus, the responsibility and need for documentation, archiving, and preservation become crucial. 

HAMACA provides the services of cataloging, managing, circulating, and preserving audiovisual pieces across the Spanish context from the late 60s to the present. The aim to preserve these practices emerges as a reaction in light of the lack of attention that video heritage gets from institutions. Together with tasks of documentation and preservation of the audiovisual footage, HAMACA is constantly promoting social and institutional sensibility towards the need of creating new policies of national audiovisual patrimony preservation.

The works included in the HAMACA catalogue are selected by external juries, heterogeneous, and specialized in the field of audiovisual historiography and artistic creation. Currently, every two years, HAMACA opens a call to enter new works into the archive. The jury of each call selects around 40-50 works and selects another 10 artists who have not applied and invites them to become part of the archive.