This article examines the potential to reconceptualize the archives of the Italian ‘New Theatre’ (1959–1979), a period of experimental, collaborative, and politically engaged theatre practices that emerged across Italy between the late 1950s and the late 1970s, as dynamic, affective, and political environments rather than merely static repositories of documents. The project INCOMMON: In Praise of Community. Shared Creativity in Arts and Politics in Italy (1959–1979), funded by the European Research Council (2016–2022), has gathered, digitized and analyzed thousands of documents from the Italian ‘New Theatre’ scattered across private collections, municipal archives, and forgotten boxes. This initiative resulted in a digital platform that goes beyond mere cataloguing; it transforms these materials into relational cartographies reflecting artistic and political life. The first section of this paper focuses on the entanglement between archive, performance studies, and affect theory. Drawing on a complex genealogy that spans philosophy, performance studies, and cultural theory, INCOMMON adopts the idea that performance archives are not complete representations but affective constellations where persistence and loss remain inextricably entangled. Such an approach avoids a positivist narrative of ‘full documentation’, foregrounding instead the incompleteness, fragility, and relationality of archives as constitutive of their epistemological power. The second section explores how INCOMMON addresses these challenges by proposing a digital archive not as a neutral, stable repository, but as a field of forces where contrasting tensions coexist and contend. Rejecting the notion of a fixed foundation, the archive operates as a dynamic space of interaction where materials, users, and memory practices intersect to reshape how theatre histories are constructed and encountered. Structured through multiple user interfaces – referred to as ‘views’ – the digital atlas offers diverse pathways of access and engagement. Rather than simply presenting information, it becomes an inhabitable space where documents are set in motion, activating relationships and generating new possibilities for engaging with history and historiography. The INCOMMON archive reframes archiving as a dynamic, embodied, and affect-driven operation. The archive itself becomes a performance: not a passive collection, but an active environment where memory, affect, and politics converge.
INCOMMON. Affective Environments and Politics in a Digital Archive of Italian ‘New Theatre’ (1959-79)
Giada Cipollone
In corso di stampa
Abstract
This article examines the potential to reconceptualize the archives of the Italian ‘New Theatre’ (1959–1979), a period of experimental, collaborative, and politically engaged theatre practices that emerged across Italy between the late 1950s and the late 1970s, as dynamic, affective, and political environments rather than merely static repositories of documents. The project INCOMMON: In Praise of Community. Shared Creativity in Arts and Politics in Italy (1959–1979), funded by the European Research Council (2016–2022), has gathered, digitized and analyzed thousands of documents from the Italian ‘New Theatre’ scattered across private collections, municipal archives, and forgotten boxes. This initiative resulted in a digital platform that goes beyond mere cataloguing; it transforms these materials into relational cartographies reflecting artistic and political life. The first section of this paper focuses on the entanglement between archive, performance studies, and affect theory. Drawing on a complex genealogy that spans philosophy, performance studies, and cultural theory, INCOMMON adopts the idea that performance archives are not complete representations but affective constellations where persistence and loss remain inextricably entangled. Such an approach avoids a positivist narrative of ‘full documentation’, foregrounding instead the incompleteness, fragility, and relationality of archives as constitutive of their epistemological power. The second section explores how INCOMMON addresses these challenges by proposing a digital archive not as a neutral, stable repository, but as a field of forces where contrasting tensions coexist and contend. Rejecting the notion of a fixed foundation, the archive operates as a dynamic space of interaction where materials, users, and memory practices intersect to reshape how theatre histories are constructed and encountered. Structured through multiple user interfaces – referred to as ‘views’ – the digital atlas offers diverse pathways of access and engagement. Rather than simply presenting information, it becomes an inhabitable space where documents are set in motion, activating relationships and generating new possibilities for engaging with history and historiography. The INCOMMON archive reframes archiving as a dynamic, embodied, and affect-driven operation. The archive itself becomes a performance: not a passive collection, but an active environment where memory, affect, and politics converge.
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