Sharing Archive has launched the research and production of Beyond Archive, new artistic productions, an exhibition, and an international symposium.

Starting from the collaboration between two archives—different but complementary—that preserve two collections related to video art (Careof, Milan) and industrial film (Archivio Nazionale Cinema Impresa, Ivrea), Beyond Archive was born with the intention of developing social, political, and cultural research. It investigates modernist utopia from multifaceted perspectives, starting with the industrial legacy left by the figure of Adriano Olivetti. It explores themes that include various moments of Italian industrial history, placed in dialogue with an international dimension. A heritage of places and ideas, not mere remnants of a utopian and creative past, but a living memory of an industrial and social project unique in the world.

Given the specificity of the content, and starting from the theme of the archive—which today represents one of the most debated issues in contemporary art—Careof launched in February 2019 two artistic residencies for research and production as an initial form of investigation. The artists Beto Shwafaty (BR) and the duo Raphaël Cuomo & Maria Iorio (CH) were invited to interact with this valuable repository of materials. Through reading and reinterpretation, the archive thus became a thermometer of an extended time and space, the mirror of a city, a country, and a continent.

The Ivrea archive provides an important portrait of post-war industrialized Italy, marked by social change and internal conflict in the world of labor. This overview includes the development of workers’ and post-workers’ movements, the formation of feminist movements inside and outside factories, and reflections and debate on rights and technological innovation. The archive also testifies to the importance of design and architecture in the thought and action of some of the most enlightened figures of the Italian entrepreneurial landscape between the 1950s and 1970s. This material is indeed the mirror of an idea of a country and of what art, business, design, and architecture—at different times and with different sensitivities—have developed, but it is also a tool that allows artists and the public to activate investigative models capable of transfiguring this identity, recontextualizing it or placing it at the center of the discussion.

How has labor changed, and what is the current relationship between production and society? What reflections today feed our relationship with that historical memory? What imagery did this idea of well-being rooted in the capitalist model construct? What has the modernist utopia produced in the extra-Western world in the era of decolonization?

On Saturday, November 23, 2019, inside Casa Blu Olivetti (today the headquarters of the Olivetti company) in Ivrea—a city now a UNESCO World Heritage Site for its industrial architecture—Beyond Archive will unfold in the form of two significant moments:

• an exhibition of audiovisual materials, presenting works by the artists Beto Shwafaty and Raphaël Cuomo & Maria Iorio, along with a selection of archival materials;

• an international symposium divided into three parts:

  • theoretical reflection;

  • archives as spaces for the continuous (re)definition of their status and role;

  • artistic and research practices that place the work on the archive—of a historical or living memory—at the center.

Participants include: Martina Angelotti (curator Careof, Milan); Cristina Baldacci (art historian, Università Ca’ Foscari, Venice); Evan Calder Williams (researcher and artist, New York); Bartolomeo Corsini (director Fondazione Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia–Archivio Nazionale Cinema Impresa, Ivrea); Gaetano Adolfo Maria Di Tondo (vice president, director of External and Institutional Relations Olivetti / president Associazione Archivio Storico Olivetti); Annamaria Licciardello (Fondazione CSC–Archivio Nazionale Cinema Impresa and co-curator of the project); Matteo Lucchetti (curator Visible Award, Fondazione Pistoletto); Federica Martini (art historian, ECAV - Ecole cantonale d'art du Valais); Marco Peroni (writer, Ivrea); Stefanie Schulte Strathaus & Markus Ruff (Arsenal, Berlin); Enrico Terrone (philosopher, Università di Barcellona).

The project is carried out with the support of Compagnia di San Paolo, within the framework of the “Bando ORA! Produzioni di Cultura Contemporanea.”
Visit ora.compagniadisanpaolo.it
Beyond Archive is also supported by ProHelvetia - Fondazione Svizzera per la cultura.