Curated by Giulia Vallicelli / Compulsive Archive
In the late 1990s, as a generation was learning to see the world upside down, large quantities of photocopied paper circulated throughout Italy: punk, riot grrrl, emo and queercore fanzines. They were neither alternative newspapers nor political manifestos, but something more unstable and revealing. Hybrid stapled publications mixing music, bodies, desires, current affairs, anger and irony with reviews, diaries, collages and open letters. They were mailed, passed from hand to hand at concerts and left on tables in self managed spaces. Objects made to be leafed through, not to last. Like home movies, fanzines are amateur documents, at once intimate and public: print media in miniature. They do not tell history from above, but from the margins, sometimes from the bedroom. They reveal who the young people in the decade preceding Genoa 2001 were, what they listened to, how they dressed and what they dreamed about. They are the culture produced before and alongside the events we now historicise, at the dawn of the internet and street television, when producing your own medium was still a material act: photocopier, scissors, glue, stamps. Compulsive Archive preserves hundreds of these publications, which are largely absent from institutional archives, and puts them back into circulation through exhibitions, residencies and new editions. Materials made by people who never expected to become the subject of research and who, in some cases, do not wish to be one today. This is not an act of commemoration of Generation X. It is a curatorial question addressed to the present, at a time when new generations are returning to self-publishing on paper: what do we preserve of those who sought other possible worlds on a small scale – in a room, in a band, in twenty hand-stapled pages – and for whom do we preserve it?
Giulia Vallicelli
Giulia Vallicelli (Rome, 1979) is an audiovisual archivist and the founder of Compulsive Archive, a Milan-based archive and project space devoted to fanzines and materials produced within punk, feminist and queer cultures in the 1990s and 2000s. Raised in Rome’s underground scene, she has been involved in the independent distribution of music and self-published materials since the mid-1990s. For about twenty years, she has worked with public and private audiovisual archives, including that of the University of Milan. Compulsive Archive contributed to the volume “Out of the Grid: Italian Zine 1978 2006” (Les Presses du réel, 2024) and has collaborated with book fairs academic institutions and exhibition
projects. More recently, the archive participated in the publication of amateur filmmaker Pietro Perotti’s “The Fiat Mirafiori Toilets. Actions and photographies” (Viaindustriae, 2025) and curated the screening series “Films as Zines” at the CinemaO Foundation (Milan, 2026). She organises talks, exhibitions and residencies for artists and researchers, approaching the archive as an active form of the present.
Compulsive Archive is a Milan-based archive and project space devoted to fanzines, independent publications and materials produced within punk subcultures. Founded by Giulia Vallicelli in 2016, it grew out of a desire to preserve what remains outside established canons and bring it back into circulation as living material for reading, exchange and imagination. At the heart of the collection are Italian fanzines from the 1990s and 2000s: a rich scene that remains largely unexplored by academic and institutional research, and which Compulsive Archive approaches as a field of study rather than a historical relic. Alongside its Italian holdings, the archive collects publications from international contexts, focusing on the connections between local networks and transnational circulation. Compulsive Archive approaches the archive as an active form of the present through visual research, editorial production and practices of transmission. It organises talks, exhibitions and public events, incorporating residency programmes that transform its publications into new questions.
