The future is in an archive

What is an archive? And why collect thousands of documents, analog and digital images, magnetic tapes, CDs, DVDs, Blu-rays, books and unidentified objects forgotten by time? What to do with all this ancient memory, often dusty, in some cases of uncertain provenance that must even be handled with white gloves so as not to ruin it? Good archivists explore these submerged worlds , from the Greek archeion which becomes the Latin archivum, to order them, bring them back to life and deliver them to posterity, true arks of memory where the past is kept in order to allow the future to build new worlds .

One of these arks is the quarterly magazine of the Venice Biennale , launched in 1950 and active until 1971 with 68 published issues, which is now reborn “with the same spirit and nature that distinguished it since the first edition”, says Debora Rossi, editorial director of the magazine and head of the Historical Archive of Contemporary Arts of the Venice Biennale – Asac, “governed by a guiding word, research, a term that recurs in the same law establishing the Biennale and whose sectors of activity are the visual arts, architecture, dance, music, theatre, cinema and everything that represents a space for reflection and discussion around the present, always with the prospect of better understanding and imagining the future”. A living archive, like the city that hosts it, in which today as in the past, once the exhibitions and festivals have concluded, all the activities are transformed into memory and become new material for research. Born with the first edition of the International Art Exhibition in 1895, the Asac was consolidated in 1976 and collects an enormous quantity of heterogeneous materials: the Historical Fund with documents, correspondence and contracts, the Sound Archive with over 27,000 plates, 40,000 negatives, 800,000 positives, 150,000 slides and 120,000 digital images created since the 2000s, the poster collection with over 4,700 copies, the documentary collection and the press review, the Artistic Fund with over 4,000 works and the Library with over 170,000 volumes and 3,000 periodicals, the Media Library, the Film Library, the collection of scores and musical scores.

The recently reborn quarterly magazine of the Biennale is dedicated, among others, to the archive of Ingmar Bergman in Fårö and that of William Basinski

The first issue of the new magazine, “ Diluvi vicini venturi ”, opens with the verse of the comrade Majakovskij “The sun has dried with the heat / the night of the flood” and continues, among other suggestions, with the infinite walks through the Venetian streets of the Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk. In the second issue, “La forma del caos”, the archives that Ingmar Bergman built in 1960 in Fårö, his lunar island lost in the Baltic Sea, and those of old tapes that the American composer William Basinski reuses to build a sound labyrinth of emotions and memories, open up. And again, among others, the meaning of archives according to choreographer Carolyn Carlson, architect Carlo Ratti, writers Claudio Magris and Javier Cercas, photographers Francesco Zizola and Paolo Pellegrin, Moroccan architect and scientist Aziza Chaouni: artists, scientists and thinkers all enclosed in this magnificently laid out magazine-theca, which gives voice to the immense archive of the Biennale.

Someone has defined Venice as a place to meet, because this eastern capital is the place where all colors and peoples have the possibility of having a domicile, a sort of Borgesian Aleph, and this magazine is the best map to explore it.

From the Library of Alexandria to the “Pinacoteca” of Philostratus the Elder, a rhetorician of the 2nd century AD who tells of an entire imaginary museum

Treasure chests where knowledge is preserved have existed since ancient Greece, from the library of Alexandria containing more than 700,000 volumes, to the “Pinacoteca” of Philostratus the Elder, a rhetorician from the 2nd century AD who tells his young disciple about an entire imaginary museum. Up to the current archive of the Istituto Luce, founded in 1924 as a propaganda tool for the regime, which later became an important public institution for the distribution of films for educational and informational purposes. Or, even more, to the Teche Rai, second only to the BBC, founded just in 1995 but which contain everything that has been broadcast by Italian TV and radio. In practice, the history of the twentieth century and the remnants of the new millennium.

As the poet Franco Battiato sang, “Venice instinctively reminds me of Istanbul, the same buildings by the sea, red sunsets that get lost in nothingness”, but my journey into the heart of the archives continues towards Milan where I meet Francesca Molteni , author of documentaries on architecture and design, who has dedicated many of her works to containers of stories for the future: “A film about an archive is an almost impossible challenge”, tells me the director who in 2018 made “NEWMUSEUM(S). Stories of archives and corporate museums” and followed with her cameras the famous red boxes by Renzo Piano for the beautiful documentary “The Power of the Archive”: arriving from Athens at the port of Genoa, the large colored boxes are unloaded from a truck and contain projects, sketches, drawings and models of famous works by the studio. “Archives have an immense need to be told, studied, digitized, preserved. But narration is needed. The new generations have an extreme need for this visual aspect that is part of their lives because they have cell phones, videos, images that they continually exchange”. The Genoese architect echoes her, debunking the myth of archives as display cases containing only perfect works: “In our case, perhaps it is a little different because the poorly made thing also matters a lot, the thing that only served as a springboard, like when you have to cross a river: you go from one stone to another, step by step, and in the end you have arrived on the other side”.

Francesca Molteni and the feat of following with cameras the famous red boxes of Renzo Piano, containing projects, sketches, drawings and models

A few years earlier, another Milanese director, Alina Marazzi , made the touching documentary “Un'ora sola ti vorrei” (2002), the story of a daughter, the director herself, who reconstructs the face and history of her suicidal mother, Luisa Marazzi Hoepli, through many Super8 films shot by her grandfather, the publisher Ulrico Hoepli. It is said that “the archive is the future of documentary” and the use of period materials, amateur films in Super8 and 16 mm, commonly called “found footage”, is at the centre of attention for directors all over the world. The most interesting cases are the documentary films “Diego Maradona” (2019) by Asif Kapadia and “Prima della fine. Gli ultimi giorni di Enrico Berlinguer” (2024) by Samuele Rossi: the first reconstructs the crazy parable of the most transgressive footballer of all time and the second the last days of the life of the secretary of the PCI. In both cases, the narration is entrusted exclusively to footage from archives, often unpublished and rediscovered, of private televisions, amateur filmmakers and state televisions. Or again “Apollo 11” (2019), the documentary that director Todd Douglas Miller made on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the moon landing: a painstaking work that lasted three years among the hundreds of hours of never-before-screened footage owned by Nara, the US National Archives, which holds government and historical documents.

Chaos and transience are the two forces that animate every archive, where the unequal battle of digitization and cataloging is constantly fought, to make everything accessible to the general public. But as long as an archive remains in the famous display cases it is as if it did not exist: the American director Brett Morgen for example, author of the documentary “Moonage Daydream” (2022) on David Bowie, discovered only after the rock star's death the existence of an enormous quantity of unpublished footage obsessively collected by the musician throughout his life. It then took him five years to review everything, thus discovering images that no one had ever seen, for a fresco that ferries the rock star towards an eternal memory.

The journey through living archives stops in Bologna , where for more than twenty years the Home Movies Foundation – National Archive of Family Films has collected, restored and promoted the audiovisual heritage of amateur cinema, with more than 40,000 films in all historical formats (among many: Super8, 16mm, Vhs), a flow of memories and experiences from all over the country and from all eras. The skilled hands of the Foundation's operators preserve these memories and experiences with an educational and artistic perspective that starts from the archaeology of the media for a journey towards the future, aware that the famous "family films" acquire greater meaning only when they leave the archive itself and mix with the world and the gaze of others.

At the exhibition “Fashion in Light 1925-1955” you can discover rarities such as the film on the Borsalino manufacturing process or the one in Coco Chanel's atelier

“In the Istituto Luce archive I found not only an exceptional, affectionate work team, boys and girls who love the work they do, in love with their archive,” Fabiana Giacomotti , curator of the exhibition “Moda in Luce 1925-1955. Alle origine del Made In Italy,” tells me in Florence, “that immense archive is a kind of Chronos who eats his children, because if you start to look beyond what you are looking for, it overwhelms you with its wealth.” The exhibition on the origins of Italian fashion, inaugurated last June 17 and open until September 28 at the Gallerie del Costume in Palazzo Pitti, is promoted by the Ministry of Culture and organized and created by Archivio Luce Cinecittà: it reconstructs thirty fundamental years of the history of Italian fashion before its definitive international affirmation, years in which, as Fabiana Giacomotti declared in a press conference, “our critical conscience and our history and our independence were founded.” Here too, the Luce archive, which under the heading “fashion” alone has collected over 600 images and 2,778 films from 1925 to the end of the 1980s, including Italian and foreign fashion shows, has allowed us to uncover authentic rarities never seen before: from the silent film from 1925 on the manufacture of the Borsalino felt hat, to the one from 1933 in the atelier of the legendary Coco Chanel with her ingenious system of mirrors, or the 1949 documentary “Sette canne per un abiti” by Michelangelo Antonioni, who still signed himself Michelangiolo. Opening these archives to the public is an important and symbolic cultural operation that, by recounting the past of specialized manufacturing and Italian manual excellence, carries the idea of ​​fashion into the future of industry. Thanks to the charm of the historic building, the exhibition brings to life in a timely manner the transformation of our country's customs: Fabiana Giacomotti's face lights up when she points to the black velvet overcoat with ermine collar by Sandro Radice from 1936, or when she talks about extraordinary women like Maria Monaci Gallenga who opened her first Italian fashion boutique in Paris in 1926. The precious heritage of the Luce Archive is accompanied by garments and accessories from prestigious museums such as Palazzo Morando, Boncompagni Ludovisi, Fortuny, and from private and corporate archives such as Ferragamo, Gucci, Emilio Pucci and Missoni, which Giacomotti has selected to transform this enormous display case into a memory of the future.

The last stop on this journey through living archives is in Palermo, where Florinda Saieva and Andrea Bartoli, founders of the Farm Cultural Park in Favara , a stone's throw from Agrigento, are finishing the works for the opening on July 5 of “Countless Cities”, the Biennial and Museum of the Cities of the World, hosted in the former Convent of the Crociferi, in the heart of the Kalsa, which will become a large archive of art, architecture, sounds and stories of cities from all over the planet, from Astana to Caracas, from Detroit to Kinshasa.

The great Texan ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax, the man who recorded and catalogued all the sounds of the world, had defined his trip to Italy in search of traditional folk music as “the happiest year of my life”, which is also the title of his beautiful book published by Saggiatore: Lomax’s immense archive is now online and available for free and collects, in addition to Mississippi blues and African tribal music, that of the bagpipers of Caggiano and photos of the tuna fishery of Sciacca. Thousands of voices and images patiently collected and preserved to give, to those who come after, the discovery of wonder.

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