Description
The recomposition of ‘lost’ archives poses a hugely important, yet undertheorized, challenge for archivists and preservation specialists. To this point, scholarship on ‘lost’ archives and archival ‘silences’ has largely focused on archives destroyed–or restricted–in war, environmental disaster or at the hands of colonial authorities. These analyses center official archives–colonial, municipal, state and corporate–that existed within fixed spatial and temporal boundaries prior to their destruction or mutilation. This essay, instead, addresses scholarship on ‘lost’ archives to a set of less fixed archives: materials produced through document work during Italy’s so-called Hot Autumn (1969-1970). In this period, cultural, political and social action flowered via a range of extra-parliamentary groups centered in Italy’s industrialized northern cities. A multitude of pamphlets, posters, manifestos, journals, magazines and coded internal correspondence was produced, yet much of this documentary heritage was destroyed in the aftermath of a set of laws that effectively criminalized the production, possession and distribution of documents deemed antagonistic by the Italian state. The following analysis is an attempt to recompose the discontinuities and complexities of these ‘lost’ archives. Towards this end, both traditional and postmodern approaches to archival value are called into question. Instead, a relational notion of value, influenced by functional appraisal as well as Marxian value-form theory, is posed as a means of reconstructing the social relationships between archival objects, participants in their creation and those engaged in their archivization, curation and preservation.