Archive # 3 - The American Issue

In the years that see the world finally being able to reopen the archives of wars and devastating moments of the last century, Magazine Archive he accomplishes an extraordinary and unique work: he creates an entire magazine exclusively with the power and descriptive capacity that only archives can give, wisely studied and examined. No material is built specifically for the magazine, which is composed only of archive materials subjected to a skilful work of research, assembly and graphic design, to build a small Italian archival masterpiece. 

Archivio Magazine was born in 2017 in Turin, it is a six-monthly periodical and has reached its third edition, The American Issue, available on Frab's.

Archivio was born from the minds of Achille Filipponi and Matteo Milaneschi and is published by Reminder, Turin company (and the only one in Italy, we read on their website) that works on the archives and, starting from these, returns to its customers tools of "strategic and cultural innovation". It almost seems like a contradiction in terms, but trust me, it's not.

Far from being a vintage jumble of old texts or archive photos, the Archive gives current value to yesterday’s content, becoming the emblem of how much innovation in the publishing field can be true even in Italy. 

It must also be said that building an entire publication using only pre-existing materials requires a profound work of analysis, knowledge, evaluation and scouting of public and private archives and collections, sometimes easy to consult or much more often difficult to find. These elements are enough to make us understand the inestimable value of this independent magazine. 

An African American woman on the cover welcomes us to the third issue. The theme, theAmerica, it seems to want to tell us everything and nothing, but the opening editorial comes to our rescue. Here we read: "(in the archives, editor's note) there is a lot of America everywhere, even where there was no sense".

And then follows a 224-page full immersion in the truest America: from a small community of surfers with finds unearthed to the California Surf Museum, we move on to the incredible photographs of the Johnson Collection which portray the canons of transgressive and eccentric beauty of the 70s. It even reaches the National Cinema Museum of Turin with Hello Male, a 1978 film by Marco Ferreri of which the Kodak films laboriously worked to produce this work are shown, which reached the 31st Cannes Film Festival. The magazine's glossy insert is dedicated to the (Dead) Boys Club, and describes the shattered lives of a gothic La Crosse, Wisconsin.

For photography lovers, the enjoyment is very high as the images of an America of yesteryear flow by, with designs and typefaces that we see returning to the present day as in an eternal cycle of history that, from the archives, returns to light.

Archive touched us inside, if you want to try it you can find it here, on Frab's Magazine.

Enjoy the reading!