Bring the Archive into the World

Bring the Archive into the World. It is a generative and creative idea that has guided us in this 15th edition of Archivio Aperto, which inaugurates the first competitive section for found footage features and shorts, made from archival, often private, images. The surprising result of the international call launched in this edition is not only the incredible quality of the selected works – 16 titles including feature and short films, from 15 countries around the world and in many cases Italian premieres – but a real semantic reversal. On closer inspection, in fact, the world is returned to us through the archives. The reuse of private images in contemporary documentary and experimental works is more and more, in fact, a political act as well as an artistic fact, increasingly charged with social and cultural implications. Found footage works teach us to sink our gaze into the dimension of the private and the removed and to make the past resonate in the present in order to rethink it, recode it, transform it. Through private stories that become public, micro-stories that illuminate subjectivities, events, spaces and relationships long invisible, the use of found footage overturns the cages of representation and opens us to what appears to be a visual revolution.