Anatomy of an archive is the first chapter of a project on analogue photographic materials, such as paper and film, that have now expired and remain unused in the warehouses of various Italian museums. These same materials were once used by photographers to document the landscape, architecture and historical, artistic and archaeological artefacts in the museum.
In the storerooms of the Sigismondo Castromediano Museum in Lecce, I found a series of packages of photographic paper that had expired decades ago and were used by photographers of the time.
Time and oxidation of the silver salt emulsion had caused the paper to become unusable, immediately blackening on contact with the developing liquid. After several attempts, I tried to find a way, in the darkroom, to use this material while obtaining readability of the images. So I tried to print some photographs I had taken in the museum's storerooms, of those same exhibits that had been photographed and printed with that paper in the past, representing important fragments of the Apulian landscape.
The result is not the same, what emerges are unrecognisable images, very grey and dark, in which the signs of chemistry and alterations to the paper are superimposed on the printed subjects.
I also worked on some unfiled glass plates found in the museum. On the one hand, I photographed the surface of these plates, focusing on their appearance not as photographs but as photographic objects, showing the marks left by time. On the other, I printed a temporary and ephemeral archive of these never-catalogued images with the same expired paper: using the "lumen" technique, which avoids developing and fixing the paper, I impressed it only under sunlight, so that these photographs remain visible on the surface for a limited time, until they vanish in the unstoppable blackening process of unfixed paper exposed to light.
This experiment attempts to investigate various aspects of the relationship between photography and the archive, between temporality, materiality and documentation, with the intention of proposing a different point of view on the museum landscape.
The first chapter of this project was realised during the 'Anatomy of a Museum' residency at the Polo Biblio-Museale di Lecce.
