«The whole room suddenly filled with a thick white fog». Gli archivi tra mediazione e comunicazione

Archives, public or private, are the place where individual and collective events meet and are told, where threads of a skein intertwine and unravel, a skein made up of the “papers” produced and preserved by the so-called civil society and its institutions, that together compose and narrate the multifaceted political-cultural and social history of a country. But, if not correctly communicated and narrated, archives risk turning into that enormous, gloomy, and cemetery-like warehouse, that no one can and wants to access. Destined, therefore, to lie covered in dust and condemned to oblivion, which recalls the archive and the archivist’s portrayal brought to the scene by Totò in a famous film from the 1950s. To avoid the risk of a collective amnesia, it is therefore necessary to resort to effective and pervasive communication tools and new ways of storytelling, that go beyond the traditional forms of mediation that archivists implement in research rooms and in the production of research tools. The goal is to – returning to the title of this paper – lift the thick fog that has always surrounded archives, to reveal the “orbs” where, instead of wizards’ prophecies, are recorded traces of memories, more or less distorted and distorting, of political, social and cultural reality of a community.