Archivio is the magazine of Promemoria Group, an Italian organisation dedicated to archival culture, and it operates on a premise that sounds scholarly but produces something closer to revelation: every story is built entirely from archive documents. Photographs, sketches, letters, contact sheets, set designs, mood boards, scores, ephemera — the raw materials of creative production that were never meant to be published. The magazine excavates them, curates them, and presents them with a contemporary sensibility that makes the past feel urgent.
Founded in 2017, Archivio has published eleven issues across three editorial cycles of four issues each, with editorial direction by Daniela Hamaui and art direction by Alessandro Gori. Each cycle is structured thematically: the first explored archives by decade (the sixties, seventies, eighties, nineties), the second moved through domains (a centenary issue, a crime and power issue, a design issue curated by Jasper Morrison and Marco Sammicheli, a fashion issue guest-edited by Stefano Tonchi), and the third is currently underway with thematic issues curated by guest editors with deep expertise. The contributors read like a cultural atlas: Letizia Battaglia, Giorgio Armani, Nobel laureate Gao Xingjian, Oscar winner Dante Ferretti, Dacia Maraini, Carlo Ginzburg, Carla Sozzani, Olivier Saillard, Andrew Bolton, Michele de Lucchi. The archives explored include Dior, Balenciaga, Yves Saint Laurent, Olivetti, the Turin Cinema Museum, the Archives Nationales de France, La Triennale di Milano, and the Cassero LGBT Center.
The Crime and Power Issue won the 2018 Stack Award for Best Use of Photography, and the first four issues sold out entirely. Printed as a limited edition on Fedrigoni paper, distributed across four continents through partners including Frab’s Magazines, Les Presses du Réel, and Antenne Books, Archivio has built a readership of over twenty thousand people who understand that the past is not a finished product. It is a working document, full of possibilities pursued and possibilities abandoned — and the distance between the two is where the most interesting stories live.
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